I tried this to and had the same experience on half the books I tried to create. A lot of products I've tried have this issue and I think it will get better. I've been using and will stick to KidsAIStory as it allows me to use the same characters across the books. Also my child would be sad that they can't read their favorite series when google kills off another product.
You can also use a slightly modified version of these sub flows to mute all Alexas of which I do. I try to do everything local behind a firewall. There is just somethings like Spotify / speakers / mic that is really hard to do / very few products that work local only.
You can kind of do this with the mini-media-player and Spotify card. I guess I need to do a write up on this. It doesn't work the greatest unless you have audio groups setup. You could define a scene with the speakers and playlist you want to play as well.
Congrats! I wish we could do the same but with full time employee(s) being covered. But I'm terrible at marketing and just want to build the oss products. We have over 1k stars in multiple projects for .NET but the developer market is hard to get paying customers (we all want everything for free ;-)). It also doesn't help we have massively funded companies competing against us...
Every room has a minimum of 7+ sensors (motion, occupancy, light sensor, nightlight, sound, mic, temp, humidity, smoke & carbon (and all related nest sensors like battery, last check, status..., path lighting (not included)). Then light switches are all smart + have occupancy + dimmer level etc... It adds up quick...
I have some crazy node red sub flows where I use state machines to turn on based on conditions and I can do whole home announcements as well as level audio and use it for custom security solution. I have smart bulbs too in some rooms and everything is 100% local with no external dependencies (if voice assistant stops working it doesn't affect anything and I'm going to probably move everything to almond). I built everything around sub flows and I made it easier to debug by adding friendly toggles that actually let me do some crazy accessibility stuff like announce motion or lights turning on etc.. If you were blind you'd know exactly where you were at.
I'm also doing local facial recognition (lots more todo) and I'm starting to integrate those into custom automations based on whose in the room (wife or me). It also greets us when we get home. It's been my dream since I was a little kid to have a smart home, and by smart I mean work for me and be quality of life improvement while being dumb for everyone (progressive enhancement). Home should alert you to dangerous weather or do the proper thing if a fire happens (open windows/ doors, turn on path lighting, announce what direction to go to the exit, etc).
I have over 500 sensors integrated into my home and when all done will have over 1k. I find the biggest problem when you get big is that home assistant has no way to deal with back pressure of updating networked sensors. Once you have issues with say 5-6 sensors it starts cascading.. you hit 10 which could be just ecobee sensors or homekit it can bring down homeassistant.
I strongly disagree, they have a good service offering but using the ui is a horrible experience. Also azure has a CLI and a much better ui / experience esp around filtering and not being overwhelmed with a million different options / pages made by developers with no usability or design experience.