Use Google Home Speakers as Smartthings Audio Notification Speakers

I tried to watch, but I was lost within minutes. Thanks for the offer to help, but I was lost at the beginning.

It’s really pretty incredible that there is no inexpensive, easy-to-integrate solution for audio notification speakers. Many of us have had to cobble something together ourselves. Mine happens to be a Raspberry Pi connected to some powered speakers which is now implemented as an Edge device. I’m actually contemplating putting together some kind of package that I could sell to the community to solve this problem. The trick is finding a decent-quality single, powered speaker that could be paired with a tiny and cheap Raspberry Pi Zero. This would give you a wireless speaker device running locally with no lag. For TTS, right now I use IBM’s Watson for it’s super high quality and and I cache the audio files locally so it only has to go to the cloud when you request a new phrase that hasn’t already been generated before. So most of the time it all runs 100% local with instant response thanks to the new Edge integration. My vision would be to have a $30 small, integrated box you just plug into an outlet wherever you need it and it would be discovered and fully integrated with SmartThings. Certainly not high fidelity for music, but good enough for audio notifications.

I’m just not sure how big of an interest there would be for something like this. For anyone curious, I got one of these tiny speaker modules for RPI from Adafruit and will be experimenting with it to see if they would be powerful enough for a solution like this.

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The solution WAS the Galaxy home mini, which seems to be cancelled, but I still have five of them and they work fine for this exact use case (plus integration of certain IR devices)

If you can find one, just buy that /shrug

It’s as simple as making an automation and selecting the home mini, then you can enter your announcement in English or Korean.

My Echo devices respond pretty quick to Alexa Routines…Almost instant. I was using LANouncer which was pretty darn good when paired with a tablet connected to dumb speaker. Actually, that worked really really good. Then came EchoSpeaks which was absolutely AMAZING!!!

Since device count in ST is limited, I had to delete alot of my (non essential) Virtual Devices which cut out alot of the chatter on the various speakers throughout the house. TBH, Alexa was speaking way too much around here and it annoyed more people than it helped. :rofl:

Following… need a tester? ST hub v2

Hey there @7522. I was experimenting with the speakers from Adafruit I had mentioned. They work, but probably aren’t going to be loud enough. I also came to these realizations:

  1. Hitting a price point of $30 or thereabouts is almost impossible without using pure junk. By the time you add up the cost of a Pi Zero (prices have gone up!), the speaker kit, a power supply, and an enclosure, it gets you up around the price of other cheap powered speakers already available, albeit that wouldn’t have the TTS integration.

  2. I thought about getting a 3D printer to create a custom case, but… that ended up looking like a rabbit hole I didn’t want to go down

  3. There’s a configuration challenge where you need access to a good text-to-speech service. As I had mentioned, I personally use IBM Watson. Although it’s free for the amount I use it, expecting a user to have to sign up for an account and go through the configuration that would be necessary would severely limit the audience. I don’t think Amazon or any other TTS service would make it any easier; they all require sign up and configuration. I haven’t really looked to see if there is any open source software available to perform this function locally. I also thought about just including a bunch of canned announcements, and making the ability to get custom ones an option for the intrepid.

So given all of the above, I haven’t progressed on this project, so am not looking for testers right now. But thanks for expressing interest! If you have any other thoughts on this topic I love to hear them.

Please can you gide me how I can use Echo Dot to announce when someone opens the Front Door

hi sounds ;ike a great idea and sounds a lot cheaper than a bose or sonos speaker can you not use the bluetooth of the pi to connect to bluetooth speakers

Yes, that’s an option, but I was trying to get to a low cost all-in-one package.

coud a pi zero w be used conected to a speaker

It has bluetooth so probably yes.

can it be used like a renderer streamer what ever its called

also just found this

Using a Pi (or Ikea speaker) to create a Sonos speaker still requires a SmartThings hub in order to connect/speak notifications?

For some reason I thought Dome Siren allowed user installed audio files, while chasing that White Rabbit I stumbled on this device.
User manual PDF download.

Some more links.
https://products.z-wavealliance.org/products/3138
https://fccid.io/FU5SE813

That’s a pretty interesting device! I wonder how loud it is?

The Zooz ZSE19 MultiSiren used to be the best ST compatible siren available, until they discontinued it - which was a mistake in my opinion. I own two of them, and they are loud. Anyone still looking for a ST natively-compatible smart speaker but are not interested in the DIY route, then I would suggest waiting for the Galaxy Home Mini 2 - even if you have no intention of using Bixby.

found this today it works with mqtt

Wifi Audio Notifier using ESP8266

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Wow this is really close to what I had in mind, although I’d like to see it support more than just mp3 files. Thanks for sharing this!

hi
he says in the video he added text to speach as well ,
i think the old speaker notify with sound uses web links to the sound files
not sure if that helps
private loadText() {
switch ( actionType) {
case “Bell 1”:
state.sound = [uri: “http://s3.amazonaws.com/smartapp-media/sonos/bell1.mp3”, duration: “10”]
break;
case “Bell 2”:
state.sound = [uri: “http://s3.amazonaws.com/smartapp-media/sonos/bell2.mp3”, duration: “10”]
break;
case “Bell 3”:
state.sound = [uri: “https://www.arnb.org/sounds/doorbell.mp3”, duration: “10”]
break;
case “Bell 4”:
state.sound = [uri: “https://www.orangefreesounds.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Doorbell-Trumpet-sound.mp3”, duration: “3”]
break;
case “Dogs Barking”:
state.sound = [uri: “http://s3.amazonaws.com/smartapp-media/sonos/dogs.mp3”, duration: “10”]
break;
case “Fire Alarm”:
state.sound = [uri: “http://s3.amazonaws.com/smartapp-media/sonos/alarm.mp3”, duration: “17”]
break;
case “The mail has arrived”:
state.sound = [uri: “http://s3.amazonaws.com/smartapp-media/sonos/the+mail+has+arrived.mp3”, duration: “1”]
break;
case “A door opened”:
state.sound = [uri: “http://s3.amazonaws.com/smartapp-media/sonos/a+door+opened.mp3”, duration: “1”]
break;
case “There is motion”:
state.sound = [uri: “http://s3.amazonaws.com/smartapp-media/sonos/there+is+motion.mp3”, duration: “1”]
break;
case “Smartthings detected a flood”:
state.sound = [uri: “http://s3.amazonaws.com/smartapp-media/sonos/smartthings+detected+a+flood.mp3”, duration: “2”]
break;
case “Smartthings detected smoke”:
state.sound = [uri: “http://s3.amazonaws.com/smartapp-media/sonos/smartthings+detected+smoke.mp3”, duration: “1”]
break;
case “Someone is arriving”:
state.sound = [uri: “http://s3.amazonaws.com/smartapp-media/sonos/someone+is+arriving.mp3”, duration: “1”]
break;
case “Piano”:
state.sound = [uri: “http://s3.amazonaws.com/smartapp-media/sonos/piano2.mp3”, duration: “10”]
break;
case “Lightsaber”:
state.sound = [uri: “http://s3.amazonaws.com/smartapp-media/sonos/lightsaber.mp3”, duration: “10”]
break;

So was exploring options with the impending smart app demise (web-cast etc) and noticed that much like the Alexa routines mentioned, Google routines has the same integration to broadcast based on your associated smart devices. Start in Google Home app…

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