Assigning a media player as the speaker for an Alexa group

Configuration Voice Assistant
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1

I’m trying to expose some media player entities (specifically, Sonos speakers) to Alexa through Home Assistant Cloud, and assign them as speakers to Alexa groups (see image below). Making this assignment does a few things:

  • It allows playback control using Alexa (i.e. - “Alexa, next track,” “Alexa stop”)
  • It decreases volume on the speaker while talking to Alexa

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The entity is exposed and visible in the Alexa app, but it isn’t visible in the Alexa app’s speaker picker inside the Alexa group. Note that assigning an Echo using the “Linked Alexa Devices” setting on the device in the Alexa app does not accomplish what I’m trying to do.

Anybody have any idea how to expose a Sonos speaker to through Home Assistant Cloud to Alexa in a way that allows it to be assigned as a group’s speaker?

Here’s the whole scenario: I have two homes that are on opposite coasts of the US, both with a bunch of Amazon Echo smart speakers and Sonos speakers. I have a site-to-site VPN between the two locations, and Home Assistant works great over that connection (i.e. - I can control devices, including media player devices seamlessly in either location from the same Home Assistant instance), and I have all of my Echo speakers attached to a single Amazon account, but I have two separate Sonos “households.” Alexa only allows you to connect a single Sonos household to your account, and creating a second Alexa account is proving to be too much of a PITA (Amazon apparently requires a phone number when creating new accounts, plus subscriptions and delivery notifications between the two accounts won’t work) and merging the two Sonos households isn’t practical for technical (requires forwarding multicast traffic over the VPN) and logistical (bringing a speaker from the other place to re-set-up the system on the opposite coast would be a major pain) reasons.

2

Did you manage to solve this? I am having exactly the same issue.

I have a bunch of SONOS speakers, exposed to Alexa via the HAS Alexa skill integration.

They appear in the Alexa app as ‘speakers’, and I can even add them to each Group, but I can’t get them to appear in the speaker picker to make them that Group’s default.

3

Hi,

I have also installed the Alexa Media Player Integration and all my 14 Sonos devices are listed but I can only address players from HA with a microphone! Is there a solution to use the speach notifications with all players?

4

This is not possible.

Preferred speakers in Alexa only apply to certain speakers that support this. Sonos for one (due to their partnership with Amazon) and a few others (Bose and I think Polk(?)), but they have to be natively connected to Alexa. Media players from HA do not allow for this (likely due to Amazon having a check on their end specifically for the speaker itself).

5

This isn’t possible. See my above post. If you stop exposing the speakers from HA and add the Sonos skill to Alexa, you can then set them as preferred speakers in groups.