Echo Studio silently drops Alexa announcements over 600 characters

I have a morning briefing skill that reads me a short summary of overnight events. It worked fine on the Echo Show in the kitchen and was completely silent on the Echo Studio in the office. Both devices were online, on the same Alexa account, and on the same Wi-Fi.

What was happening

When the briefing fired through the announcement-skill path, the Echo Studio would either say nothing at all or play a chime and then nothing. Drop In and music both worked perfectly on the same device, so it wasn't hardware or network. The Show would speak the full briefing without issue.

Skill logs showed the speech response was being sent. The device just wasn't playing it.

What I found

Two stacked problems.

First, the Echo Studio appears to silently drop announcement-style messages over roughly 600 characters. Shorter announcements played fine; longer ones triggered the chime preamble and then no speech. I never found a documented limit for this, only the behavior. The Show happily handled the full message.

Second, even short announcements were sometimes silenced by the device's Communications setting. The Alexa app has a global Communications/Announcements toggle, but it also has a per-device override under Device Settings. The Studio had Communications disabled at the device level, which appears to silently suppress the announcement skill's speech without rejecting the request server-side.

The fix

Two changes. For the device-level toggle, flip Communications on in the Studio's device settings in the Alexa app. That re-enabled short announcements.

For the length limit, switch from an Announcement-style skill response to a Routine that fires Alexa.Speak directly. Routines deliver the speech without the "Notification from..." preamble and don't appear to have the same length truncation behavior on Studio.

Routine setup (in the Alexa app):

When: trigger fires (custom utterance, virtual contact sensor, schedule, etc.)
Then: Alexa Says > Customized > <your full message text>
Device: Office Echo Studio

The skill backend now creates a one-shot routine via the Alexa API instead of returning a long SSML response. Briefings up to ~3000 characters play cleanly on Studio after the switch.

What I'd do differently

Two small things. First, when a device "doesn't play" something but plays other things, separate the two failure modes — settings (device-level Communications toggle) and capacity (per-device message length limit) — before assuming the issue is with the skill backend. Second, the Routine + Alexa.Speak pattern is generally more reliable than the Announcement skill response for anything longer than a sentence. I've moved everything in the house over to it.