Hi, I’m in a planning phase right now and have a question regarding notifications and more specific regarding sound/voice notifications. I want my system to remind me of things, tell me if a fire has started make noises when someone intruding, say “welcome home”, play music etc. what device should I go for? A sono speaker, an Alexa device, or google home or a mix of them?
For convenience use cases, such as “welcome home” or playing music, I find the Amazon Echo devices easiest to use. They can play custom text on the specific devices you want. They also have a library of sound effects from Door chimes to dogs barking. We do play music on them, but we don’t have very sophisticated tastes: other systems might be better for that. We really like these, and they keep adding more features. 
As far as life and death announcements like fire alerts I personally wouldn’t use anything cloud-dependent for that. There are several “interconnected” smoke alarm systems that do voice alerts: any of those would be safer than any cloud based system.
At our house we use Nest Protects because I am in a wheelchair and needed a system where I could handle false alarms from an app. We’re very happy with them, but there are a number of other brands if you don’t need all their features.
As far as a security system, that’s a whole other topic. Again I wouldn’t rely on anything cloudbased. Most use a combination of sirens and texts to your phone/smart watch rather than spoken alerts but there are options for that as well with some systems.
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