Option A: Home Assistant Cloud (the easy one)
Home Assistant Cloud is an optional subscription from Nabu Casa. It gives you Alexa and Google integrations plus remote access without dynamic DNS, SSL certificates or opening router ports. It needs a paid subscription after a 30-day trial. A note in the docs says this service is planned to be renamed Home Assistant Link on 2 December 2026, so expect the name to change on your account pages. Subscriptions also fund Home Assistant development. For most households this is the simplest and safest route because nothing on your network is exposed.
Option B: Matter bridge (community project)
The Home Assistant Matter Hub publishes your entities to Matter controllers such as Alexa, Google Home or Apple Home over your LAN. The original project by t0bst4r was discontinued in January 2026 and archived, and the actively maintained fork is by RiDDiX (add-on slug hamh; latest release 2.0.59 on 21 October 2026 as I write). This is community software, not Matter certified, so expect some rough edges.
- Install as a Home Assistant add-on (from the RiDDiX add-on repository) or as a container; there is a web UI to create bridges and choose which entities to include.
- Alexa pairing happens through the Alexa app's Matter flow. The Echo you pair with must be a Matter controller. Accept the "not certified" prompt when it appears.
- The project docs say Alexa has trouble with large bridges. Keep each bridge to a modest number of devices (they mention roughly 80 to 100 as a ceiling) and use several bridges or entity filters if you need more.
- Networking is the usual source of pain: Matter relies on mDNS and IPv6 on your LAN, so keep the bridge, Echo and Home Assistant on the same VLAN or make sure mDNS is reflected properly. The project documents an option for stripping global IPv6 addresses (mdns_strip_global_ipv6) and notes that some users fixed Alexa pairing problems by freeing port 80 on the host.
- Everything stays local, but the project is moving fast. Pin versions and read release notes.
Home Assistant's own Alexa Smart Home Skill integration gives native phrases without the skill name. The HA docs are blunt that it takes considerable effort:
- Your Home Assistant must be reachable from the internet over HTTPS on port 443 with a trusted certificate. Self-signed certificates will not work.
- You need an Amazon Developer account (the same Amazon account as your Alexa devices) and an AWS account for the Lambda function. Lambda's free tier covers 1 million requests a month.
- The Lambda region must match your Amazon account's locale, not where you live. The docs list US West (Oregon) for English (AU) skills. A Lambda in the wrong region will not work and can block account linking.
- In Home Assistant you add an alexa: block with smart_home: underneath it to configuration.yaml, and optionally use the filter and entity_config sections to control what is exposed.
- The docs advise against putting a long-lived access token in the Lambda environment; link your Home Assistant account in the skill instead.
Exposure checklist (all three options)
- Expose only what you want to speak to. Use filters instead of "everything".
- Think twice about locks, garage doors, alarm panels, gas, water and heating controls. If you expose them, require a PIN or confirmation where the integration supports it.
- Do not expose entities that run destructive scripts or restart commands.
- Use clear, short names and set the area for each entity.
- After changes, run device discovery in the Alexa app, then delete stale devices.
- Test with the internet unplugged. Anything that fails will also fail in an outage.
- Have a physical or local fallback for important devices.
Question for the group: which route are you using for Home Assistant and Alexa, and how many devices do you expose? Anyone running the Matter bridge with Echo devices on a separate IoT VLAN who has solved the mDNS side?