The easiest way is to use, but at the time I’m writing this the web version seems to be down for maintenance. We’ll start off by setting up our Phlex instance. Phlex instance, either run your own or use.Alexa Skills Kit account (use the Amazon account you use on your Alexa devices).Here’s a list of things you’ll need in order to do this: Phlex will look for the movie on Plex and start playback on the specified Chromecast device.Alexa skill sends information to lambda.Alexa, ask (name of your skill) to play the movie Cars on the living room TV.The proxy, in my case a lambda function, will take the data from the Alexa intent and create and call a request to our Phlex instance. We will set up intents for playing a certain movie or show and set up the skill to forward this information to our proxy. The way this whole thing works is that we will create an Alexa skill that will handle the voice part. But let me go over the things needed to get this to work. The easiest way to run this is using an Amazon Lambda function. My idea was to create an Alexa skill and write a sort of proxy that translates Alexa requests to Phlex requests. Luckily Phlex provides a sort of API, allowing you to pass requests in an URL. I found that it worked quite well and was quite easy to set up, the only problem was that Alexa wasn’t/isn’t quite supported yet. I stumbled across the Phlex project, an interface that let’s you use Google Assistant to control playback from your Plex server on Chromecast devices. Of course it’s possible to control playback on Amazon Fire TV devices, but those are quite difficult to get here and I definitely love my Chromecasts too much to give them up.

Since my main voice assistant is currently Alexa, I’ve been looking for a way to get something similar to work using Alexa skills. Things like playing a movie, or show from Netflix or Plex and even playing specific episodes of shows. One thing I thought was particularly cool was controlling media playback using my Google Home mini. Over the last year or so I’ve slowly started adding more and more voice control elements to my smart home. Hey there! In this post I will go through the process of setting up an Alexa skill that allows you to control Plex playback on a Chromecast device and let’s you play any show or movie from your Plex server.

Plex and alexa