I’m looking for a wireless speaker that can play voice alerts when various events occur (porch door opened/water detected in basement/etc). I played with LANnouncer and a Samsung Galaxy Android tablet and it works, but often stops working… I just don’t like so many points of failure. My house already has an old-school whole-house audio setup with an Echo connected to stream music, so I really don’t want to go the SONOS route as I’d use it pretty much only for voice alerts.
It looks like the Samsung Radiant360 R1 might have been an option, but from reading the forums, looks like people are having all sorts of issues getting them to work right.
I just want a directly supported TTS speaker that is as inexpensive as possible for this (preferably less than $100). Does anyone have a recommendation?
I had already gone down a similar path with LANNouncer on an Android tablet, but like I said, too many points of failure… it usually works at first but eventually stops and I’m tired of troubleshooting it… Smartthings is great, but everything shouldn’t have to be a science project.
I have ordered a refurbed Samsung M3 speaker to see if that works… if not, at least I can use it as a “dumb” bluetooth speaker for one of the many Echo Dots I have scattered through the house.
Dang, that’s exactly how I feel! Please do me a favor and let me know how those M3 speakers work for you. I too wish to have easy TTS capability without spending hours upon hours configuring, learning and troubleshooting.
I hear ya, man! If I get it to work successfully, I’ll let you know. The refurb I got on eBay was $90, so if it works, it sure beats dropping $200 on a SONOS Play 1. If my house didn’t already have 8 sets of hardwired ceiling speakers when I bought it, I would probably have gone the SONOS route, but instead it’s a Frankenstein monster of SmartThings, Echo Dots, Harmony remotes, Onkyo receivers, and z-wave devices and I still can’t get it to reliably announce when the porch door is open. Luckily, my hound dog makes it quite clear.
I think SmartThings it´s a hobby project, never has work as promises, is not stable, then relax and go on. If you don´t want frustration then go to other platform, because ST its a pain
I went that route and didn’t have very stable results with announcing; kept cutting off. So I ended up going the Sonos route. BUT I never did try using the DLNA connection and using the generic media renderer. You might give that a whirl. There is a local store here in town selling out of the box demo units of the Samsung speakers, M3, M5 and M7. The highest price model which I got was the M7 for $99.
Earlier, I had an always on tablet with just the SmartThings app and enabled the stock notifications in the app. I got a android notification reader from app store, not sure which one, there are plenty of free versions. I configured that app to read only my SmartThings notifications out loud. This worked for me quite well.
Pros:
Free (if you have an extra tablet/phone)
Hardly any set up You get all those notifications in your phone/other devices with SmartThings app
Cons:
No customization
Reads ALL SmartThings notifications You get all those notifications in your phone/other devices with SmartThings app
I then moved onto using tasker in android for further customization (this is more than a science project) and finally ended up with Sonos by removing the middle men (i.e. tablet and tasker). Sonos has been quite stable so far.
I just got the refurbed M3 yesterday and hooked it up via ethernet cable to my router… installed Samsung Multiroom App which detected the M3, then immediately updated the firmware in it. After that completed, I set up an audio notification to output to Speakers > M3 when my porch door opens… I did very little testing, but when I open the porch door, a second or two later, the M3 announces that the door is opened… so far, so good! I did not experience any cut-offs with the audio notifications yet, but have not tested it enough.
So, here’s a dumb question… I wanted to create an audio notification so that when my basement water sensor detects water, I hear a notification through the M3… but the “Notify Me When” SmartApp does not support audio notifications for some strange reason… I know I could create a Piston in CoRE to do this, but is there an official ST SmartApp that supports audio notifications for this?
Well, to answer my own question… I got Big Talker working great with the M3 with no audio cut-offs, and easy to set up. Big Talker has a water sensor option, so I set it up to talk when wetness is detected.
Now, any suggestions for setting up a “repeating alert” for those things that are too important to miss? For instance, if I’m not home when the water heater springs a leak, how would you create an audible notification that fired off every X minutes/hours, so when I get home, I’ll hear the alert when it next triggers.
Do you have an Alexa? If so, and with the recent integration of Big Talker with Ask Alexa, you can have the one alert of water go to your message queue. You can then be alerted of when It happened(and on your app) on your phone or when you arrive home and check your messages. For something as urgent as a water leak, however, I would have an app push a message to you instead of waiting until someone arrives home.
I do (5 echo dots spread through the house in fact). I started playing with Ask Alexa but haven’t had a chance to dive into it. It looks super cool, and I hope I can get it to work eventually, b/c I’m going all-in with Alexa. Using the echo dot would be better actually, because it’s wired to a receiver for whole house audio, so I would get the alerts anywhere in the house. I’ll spend some time with Ask Alexa and see if I can get it working for this purpose.
And yeah, I definitely have a water leak notification going to my phone already, but I like redundancy.
Got it…I like your strategy. Ask Alexa is very powerful and with the additional support from the developers of apps like Big Talker, Nest Manager and others you have a great notification hub for your home! In addition, when Amazon allows push notifications all of these apps will get the ability to have their notifications wake up and have Alexa talk through Ask Alexa.
Let me know if you need assistance with the installation…I am updating the app tomorrow with some new features and partnerships.
You mean speak on demand? No…but again, Ask Alexa allows you to send some of these alerts to Sonos or other Smartthings-intergrated speakers. Just waiting on Amazon to release push notifications.
