ST automations and audible notifications?

Using the newer ST app on my android phone. Have plugged in and paired with a ST Smart Plug. works perfectly. Created an automation to alert me when the appliance plugged in to the smart plug loses power. That also works perfectly . . . almost. I get a popup alert on my phone, but no audible notification. I have “Then” set to “Notify Members,” but “Audible Notifications” shows “No Devices.” How do I get an audible notification?

ST doesn’t support Text to Speech (Audible notification) directly through it’s native interfaces, it does support a MP3 playback but you need devices like a Sonos which support that feature.

You have a couple of options, first get a device that supports Text to Speech Notifications (like an Alexa using the Echo Speaks integration) or MP3 playback like a Sonos. If you have a MP3 playback device then you can use the ST apps directly. If you’re using TTS (Sonos also supports TTS in addition to Alexa using Echo Speaks), then you’ll need a custom app that support Audible TTS notifications like WebCoRE or if you have access to RBoy Apps, then an app like [RELEASE] Door Chimes and Notifications for Doorbells and Sensors

In SmartThings, “audible notifications” means having a device other than your phone play a sound or speak a message. So it depends on which devices you have.

If you have an echo device, you can use the official echo routines feature (not a SmartThings routine) to have it say anything you want on any or all of your echo devices. You don’t need echo speakers or any other custom smartthings code for this except for a virtual switch which will be used to trigger the echo routine

If you’re interested in that, see the following FAQ:

FAQ: Can I trigger an Echo Action without Speaking to It?

You could use the same method to trigger playing an mp3, but to be honest that doesn’t work great with echo, particularly if you want it to play on more than one device.

If instead you just meant you want your phone to make a noise when the pop-up comes up, that’s not a setting in SmartThings, that’s a setting on your phone. But I don’t know enough about android to know how you do that.

Tagging @joshua_lyon

Audible alert should work with a supported Sonos, Bose or Samsung speaker i believe. If you want to use an Echo, see the link JD posted.

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If the goal is to get an audible notification on your Android phone, you have several options. Most of them will involve using Tasker which is an automation app for Android.

There’s three primary approaches that are often used:

  • Listen to existing notifications from SmartThings
  • Push custom notifications using Pushbullet (and react to those)
  • Subscribe to events using SharpTools and react to those

Listen to existing notifications

Since you already have notifications going to your phone, you can use Tasker to react to those notifications and play a sound. Tasker has some built-in features for detecting notifications, but if you want more advanced detection around notifications, either one of the following Tasker plugins are helpful:

The upside to this is you already have the notifications coming to your phone. The downside is you have to parse the content of all the notifications received from SmartThings to try to see if they’re relevant as a trigger for your particular need. This is where Pushbullet and SharpTools really excel.

Push custom notifications using Pushbullet

Pushbullet is an awesome cross-platform notification system, but one of it’s really cool features is that it has native Tasker integration. You can filter the notifications to just those that contain specific text to use as your trigger.

One common approach is to use a hashtag or other custom snippet of text so your phone knows which task to trigger. eg. #fridgepowerloss

The upside to this is you have triggers for specific events, but the downside is you don’t have any of the data about the event that might be meaningful to you.

Event Subscriptions using SharpTools

Using the SharpTools Tasker Plugins, you can subscribe to attributes of your things which will push those events down to your phone so you can react to them.

These plugins are specifically designed for integrating SmartThings into Tasker and they pass along data like the Thing Name, Attribute Name, Attribute Value, etc as variables so you can use them in Tasker.

There’s also plugins for controlling your Things, Modes, Routines, SHM, etc.

I’m the developer of the SharpTools Tasker plugins, so you can always tag me if you have any questions. :smiley:

Tasker Music Play Action

And here’s what the Tasker Music Play action looks like. You can pick any music file on your phone and customize a few options around how far into the track to start playing, if it should loop, etc.

And there’s other ways to play Ringtones, MIDI files, etc as well if that’s more your thing. :wink:

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Yeah, I want audible notifications on my phone. I’ll certainly going to try Tasker and, likely, one of the plugins. If that doesn’t get me what I want, I’ll try Sharp Tools, ummm, depending on price.

Certainly off-topic, but I have to ask. I’ve lost audible notifications on all email/SMS on my phone. Again, popups, but no sound. Tasker can resolve that?

I’d probably try to figure out why the audible notifications were lost in the first place. You could use Tasker for custom notifications for those things, but if what you’re looking for is already available from the phone and just isn’t working, I’d focus on fixing that part first. :slight_smile:

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FWIW, I found a “Set Notification Sound” setting in the old ST app under ‘My Account.’ Apparently no such setting in the new app. Nonetheless, selecting a sound results in . . . nothing. Usually, touching a particular tone results in an audible tone. In ST I get nothing.