I am very interested in the “speech” aspect of the sonos and smarthings integration. My question is, will the speech be limited to sonos, or is it possible to add this to other setups? I have airplay speakers and stereos all over my house and don’t really want to replace everything with sonos.
Also, how is the speech being synthesized? Is sonos just playing an audio file, or is the sonos actively turning text input into speech?
Thanks for the help…
It works by telling the Sonos to play an audio file from the internet. There’s not really a way to do that with AirPlay – you have to stream the audio yourself, and the hub probably won’t be able to handle that. You’ll probably need some other device or program capable of sending Airplay audio that can be controlled by SmartThings via an API.
If you’ve got a Mac that can connect to the AirPlay devices, then our app ObyThing Music will do what you want. Once you setup your device, it will work with any of the Sonos SmartApps, including the speech synthesis in the “Notify with Sound” app. You can check it out on our site - http://obything.obycode.com.