I’m delighted to see “Speech Synthesis” capability added to SmartThings device capability taxonomy. This opens up the door to adding voice notifications to our smart homes with just a few lines of code. I gave it a shot in Smart Alarm, using VLC Things as a speech device and it worked beautifully.
If I could make a suggestion (or a request) though, I’d like to have an ability to install a “default” speech device at the “location” level, so that all apps could take advantage of it without explicitly adding a speech device to each app. In most cases a home (location) needs only one speech device for “public” announcements, in my opinion.
So instead of mySpeechDevice.speak("Hello World!")
you could simply use location.speak("Hello World!")
.