Best Speaker or configuration for TTS

Hardware
1

I’ve been using HA now for nearly a year, and am very pleased. I have a SONOS playbar, and many Amazon Echo Devices. I’m currently using this script

to send notitications to my various Echos, and it works great. I’ve tried several times to use my SONOS, and just have not had much luck. Either the volume is too low, or it does not resume, or the message stutters, etc. No big deal, I see many messages from others who seem to have the same issues. So unless this has changed, this does not seem like a good option for me.

I also had a samsung speaker that I used to use for TTS with my Smartthings install, but it never was supported in HA.

The echo setup is nearly perfect, other than it is not really supported by Amazon, and “could” stop working in the future. I was wondering if there were any simple setups that don’t require additional software (like lan announcer), and just work simply in HA.

2

you can off course always use google TTS.

which can be send to each mediaplayer, except alexa

3

That’s a good thought, I guess then that brings me to a slightly different question. What are good inexpensive “media players”/speakers for TTS. All of my current media players are TVs.

4

I use google home speaker for TTS, works perfect.

5

So, does the google home speaker show up as a media player? Does it just work natively? or is it a bit of a hack like the alexa scripts?

6

google TTS is not a hack.
because google provides TTS as a service. thats why it also works with their products.

amazon never had a TTS function.

7

It shows up as a media player, and i just call it in my automations like:

  - service: tts.google_say
    entity_id: media_player.googlehome0098, media_player.googlehome4494, media_player.googlehome7297
    data:
      message: 'Message to say'
      cache: true
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8

Tried to get TTS working with my enigma2 box, which is shown as a Mediaplayer, but there is no playback of the text.

9

any?!

I tried TTS for soooo long time with all of my mediaplayers:

  • several yamaha musiccast devices
  • several TV’s

maybe i’m too stupid to do this… I’m able to control everything except sending some tts generated mp3 to my mediaplayers :confused:

10

if you want to send TTS generated MP3 to a device, then first make sure you are able to send any other, already existing MP3 to that device.

if youre not able to play an (music)MP3 on a TV (send from anywhere), you also wont be able to send TTS to it. (unless you can install google TTS on that device, then you only need to send text)

personally i havent tried anything for years, except alexa. because i got that everywhere, and its way more easy.

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