I stumbled upon https://github.com/custom-components/alexa_media_player/wiki#what-this-is which gave me the information I needed to directly control my echo device, instead of having one echo command via voice another.
Read my post https://robertjwallace.com/creating-home-assistant-interface-to-alexa-playlists/ for background.
The difference between what I was doing in that post and what I am doing now is in the scripts.yaml file. The code to directly control my echo is:
Continue reading “Update: Creating home assistant interface to alexa playlists”