Looking for recommendations for inexpensive TTS speakers

I would like to see what others are using with Ask Alexa and other TTS capable speakers

I use these with EchoSistant…

and these…

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$69 BestBuy insignia 10" tablet running Smarttiles & Lannouncer with a $15 Bluetooth speaker

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There’s an existing topic for this:

Of course, Sonos speakers capable of being used with Ask Alexa, along anything that is compatible with SmartThings. Some creative members of the community have connected the Alexa with Bluetooth devices (like old cell phones) to allow the Alexas to be their only speakers. Ask Alexa will be getting some new features this year (along with another app I am developing) to allow even more uses with your Alexa and connected speakers, so it is a good time to have connected speakers!

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I’ve set up 2 of the $9 CHIP computers already with vlc and cheap speakers for TTS purposes.

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Another app? Do tell.

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In good time…but I will have a whole suite of items focused around Alexa, including notification apps!

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I’m using 2 Fabriq speakers that I picked up from Amazon a few weeks ago.

The thing that I like about them is you can use the Fabriq iOS or Android app to bind them together into groups for syncronized multi-room speaker playback, and if you have them grouped then when Smartthings sends TTS announcements to the one device added to Smartthings, it’ll play back on the whole group.

Although I initially had some issues with Amazon Alexa (it’s push to summon Alexa which I actually like because I don’t want an always listening speaker) but in the past 1-2 weeks it’s worked when I’ve tried it. I like that it has a play button on the speaker that will resume playing the last played stream also (usually NPR for me- though if it has played TTS announcements, sometimes the speaker thinks it needs to play that again instead of the station). With my current configuration, if I’m playing NPR and a TTS announcement happens, it seems to resume playing the station/stream automatically after the announcement about 95% of the time!]

I want to pick up at least one more, maybe two. The syncronization seems to work pretty well, so even if you’re listening to music there isn’t a noticeable timing delay when walking between rooms and hearing different speakers, with the two that I have.

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I was looking at those, but missed the lightning deal, so decided to wait until faster people had a chance to play with them for a while.

I think I might check these out. I like the fact you can just sync them and you are good.

Yeah, for the amount of time that I would actually use/need synchronized multi room music, I can’t bring myself to spend money on Sonos or running cable, so this is so much cheaper and portable, and the sound quality is good enough for me.

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I’m still holding out hope Amazon will release MRA for Echoes.

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We all are

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Have you ever tried the Caskeid on these? I had a Echo Dot connected to one S3 via Bluetooth and was hoping the other would play the same music using the Caskeid.
Couldn’t get it to work no matter what I tried.

no I have not… but I know who does…

@jasonrwise77 can you help out Don?

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@TN_Oldman did you turn on the caskeid on, on both speakers?

Yes, several times. Via app and web interface.
If you have made it work, then possibly it’s something on my setup?

I tried several different things and setups. No joy for me. I followed their sites directions several times. I was thinking tomorrow about factory resetting the speakers, remove from Echo bluetooth, and starting over to see if reconnecting them to my network fixes it.
It’s not super important, just would be nice to play music through both when I wanted to.

Factory reset would be my only other suggestion. Other than that, did you try to log into the speaker thru your browser and make sure the caskeid was checked there? That is how I got it to work for me.

Never mind, I did not read carefully above, missed where you said web interface. Sorry wish I could be more help.