I am curious, can you add a speaker to the ST hub that will play events. Such as “Kitchen rear door open” or “Motion - Master bedroom entrance”? Basically speak the alert triggers?
My father is 73 and lives at home and he would prefer something like that instead of a siren. It is also easy to receive an event that way for him to know what the trigger is instead of looking at a smart app. Sometimes he may forget to turn the system off and trip it, and he doesn’t want the neighborhood woken up.
This system is more for convenience than security for him.
What speaker do you recommend for this if it exist? No need for music or anything else. The sole purpose would be to report event triggers. Just loud and audible.
( i’ve moved this to projects so you can get answers specific to your own requirements.)
There are many different ways to do this with SmartThings, and many different possible devices you can use, but several of them have quite complex set up’s. For example, you can get this with an echo or Dot with one of two smart apps (AskAlexa or EchoSistant), but both will require that you set up an Amazon developers account, and can get pretty complicated.
Probably the easiest way to do it is with the $49 Aeon Labs Doorbell, which can play up to 99 different custom MP3 files, so you can have different notifications for different SmartThings events. Only thing is that one isn’t very loud, it’s intended to be regular doorbell volume. But it’s definitely popular.
There are lots of other options, too, and they vary in technical expertise required.
LANnouncer is another option which is probably midway in complexity between those two and can run on any android device, including just an inexpensive tablet.
If you use the quick browse lists in the community – created wiki, look under projects for “voice” and there’s a list of project reports there and you can see what other people have done.
You can also look at the quick browse lists in the smart apps section for voice.
Hello,
I recently wondered the same thing. The best way for me personally was to buy several sonos speakers. I know they can be a little pricy but they are totally worth it! Anyways I have one of mine in the kitchen announce if a door opens. You can also adjust the volume of the alert to make it loud so you can hear it in different rooms. I have it also ring a bell when my wife or children arrive home. Sonos is a Labs on smartthings but mine have worked perfectly! The smart app “SPEAKER NOTIFY WITH SOUND” is what I am using. Their are so many other options you can do with it too! Oh and btw I am using a play 1, look on eBay if you don’t want to pay full price. But trust me I am sure your Dad would love the setup.
I use Sonos speakers with Core to do several audio notifications for doors opening. The good thing with Core is you can type whatever text you want it to say so no need for finding mp3 files. Obviously Sonos are not the cheapest, but I’ve found them to be very reliable.
while certainly not plug and play I’ve recently just done this with 3 of the Aeon Doorbells (PS prices seem to have gone up on amazon, is it discontinued? are they pushing the much less flexible siren?) anyway as the previous post mentioned, you can load up to 99 voice tracks on it - without getting TOO complicated, you can easily set one of those files as the “alarm”, “tone/beep”, “doorbell” and trigger via CoRe (that’s how I do it) after trying various tones I did end up loading some text to speech files for my different doorbells “Front Door”, “Back Door”, etc must less intrusive than random chimes.
there are a ton of text to speech generators online, word of caution you will probably have to play around with amplification in audicacity (and adding trailing silence)
others might be able to better comment but supposedly the aeon doorbell does have a “text to speech” functionality of some sort but I am not sure the current DH is capable of using it at the moment?
Did the OP ever get around to solving this? I’m in a similar position myself but don’t wish to fork out for a SONOS setup when other than the occasional voice notification it wouldn’t be used.