I’ve noticed that my better half will always play music using Alexa these days, which bugs me because it’s using the built-in speaker which sounds relatively naff IMHO.
The thing is - I can’t blame her. It’s really convenient: No need to power an amp out of standby. No need to think about input selection. No need to open an app. No need to worry about zones/rooms. Easy volume control. All hands-free.
First move her from Alexa to Google. The Insignia Google boxes sound soo much better than the Amazon speakers. The are cheap on sale ( around 30 bucks at Best Buy - when on sale), work perfectly as Chromecast Endpoints.
FYI: If you have a Tidal subscription you can set up an Amazon Alexa device to use Tidal as the music source. Just Google it for complete instructions on how too set it up.
I have plex setup for this use case. It would be awesome if roon supported it as well! My family can say ‘alexa ask plex to play David Bowie’, and it will fire up the receiver to my plex/roon end point and play.
With a Chromecast/speaker endpoint, if you start the stream to it, you can use voice to skip tracks. You cannot initiate any streams, but, just being able to NEXT a track and RAISE/LOWER the volume makes it seem integrated. Maybe, if Roon could get Amazon Echos to be endpoints that might give the same level of abilities as Chromecast devices.