I want to create an automation to set the volume on my soundbar. I only use Google Assistant and Home Assistant in my house but neither seem to be able to set the volume, can only turn on and off. Surprisingly I can use Google SDK to send a command to change the input of the soundbar but doesn’t work for volume control. It seems as though Alexa is a lot more supported for my Samsung devices in particular. I did a test on my phone, installed Alexa and gave voice commands to the soundbar and it worked flawlessly.
My idea is to see if there is a way that I can get HA to pass a command to Alexa to control my device instead of using Google Assistant. I’m not an Alexa user and have no Echo devices in my house so I was hoping to do it via the cloud. Is this even possible?
I am not a Nabu Casa subscriber and it’s not an option for me. I have tried the lambda/aws/alexa developer way to integrate Alexa to HA and I can get it all connected and working but no devices show in the Alexa app. I then tried a different approach using “emulated Hue”, same result. Tried HACS component “Alexa media player”, still no devices found on HA.
I have Chromecasts throughout my home and (in HA) it allows me to select which radio station to play and to set volume. I also connected smart switches on the amplifiers so that these are switched OFF and ON at automated times.
So I suggest that you add Chromecast to your soundbars and that will let you control volume.
Though I have Google Home and Alexa in all my rooms, none are needed for my music setup, though in one room I actually use 2 Google Home Minis to cast the same radio stations as elsewhere in the home…
I actually already have a Chromecast connected, I use it in an automation when it switches from idle to playing then Google SDK sends command to switch to HDMI (chromecast) input on the soundbar. The turning on of the soundbar is also fine and controllable through home assistant/smartthings. The main problem with the soundbar is the entities are listed as sensors and not controllable. Can this be changed? It would be so simple if they could.
Edit: I also can’t use the Chromecast exclusively for volume control because when I use the TV the soundbar volume gets adjusted so I need to set both to make my automations consistent.
Would set the volume to 5. Give this a shot on yours (obviously changing the ip address accordingly - you should just be able to throw it into the address bar of your browser). If this works, you could use the HA input_number integration to create a slider which is then part of a script which sends the http commands to your soundbar. Not sure exactly how that is done (I use NR for my logic/scripting) - but guaranteed it is doable.
A couple of additional notes. If that does work, there are other commands you can get/set as well. You can find more details here:
and
It works flawlessly on my soundbar - but a small warning, it seems that it really doesn’t like it if you send (a) a lot of commands too fast or (b) invalid commands or (c) improperly formatted commands. In those scenarios (at least on my soundbar) it can lead to the bar becoming unresponsive and needing to be unplugged/re-plugged. This was only really a problem for me when I was figuring out my logic and made some minor errors in my code.
Interesting, never come across this before. I copied and pasted your example into a new tab and replaced 192.168.1.100 with my soundbar IP address but it didn’t do anything unfortunately, is that all there is to it?
Yeah, that’s all there is to it. The soundbar was in the “On” state right? If it is Off when you send the command, pretty sure it won’t work (and I think it could cause issues as the soundbar is not expecting this command when off).
You may also be able to do it with the smartthings API. You can try googling around that. I think there may be some HACS/HA integrations using that approach.
I managed to find a custom component which works well for me and gives me the “set volume” command that I needed via service call Media player: Set volume
