As you might have seen I already had homebridge setup with accessories which switched 433 MHz Sockets.
But beside those switches the options were limited (at least after some time). And meanwhile I bought an Alexa Echo Dot for 35€ and wanted to interact with my home.
At first I thought SmartHome was only a gimmick but now I would never want to get rid of it. And I even want to spend more and more time into optimizing and discovering things and changes of HomeAssistant.
It even has an integrated HomeKit component now! And the Alexa Skill is available in Germany now too!
But to the “downside” of the HomeAssistant Alexa Skill: For the Skill to work you need to create an account for Home Assitant Cloud. You get a free trial but after it expires and you realise how well it works you need to pay monthly. And I hate paying monthly. I fully understand why they want to get a few bucks for their service which probably required a lot of work.
If you have some spare money than go for it! BUT there is something called Node-Red!
Here you can see how you need to configure it to make it work with HomeAssistant. It requires a bit of time but you get tons of configuration options!