Bluetooth speakers, often with mics built in, are cheap, common and everywhere. They’d provide a great interface for the voice assistant, playing music, and notifications.
HA has added support for Bluetooth in general, and yet… there’s still no way to add a Bluetooth speaker as easily as on any phone, laptop or PC.
155 people voted for it 2 years ago. It’s time.
Ever noticed on your computer, you’re enjoying some music on a bluetooth headset. Then you turn on a video call which uses the microphone of your headset and the music quality becomes all shit? Yep, that’s because it needs to switch to lower quality if you want to use both the microphone and the speaker via Bluetooth. That makes it not a great voice assistant device.
Honestly, I mainly want this as an easy way to hook up a speaker without wires so my voice assistant can read out notifications and play music, even if the mic is never used.
I have also thought about something like this in the past.
It would be fantastic if the Bluetooth-connected speaker could then be used as a media player. In my ideal world, devices connected to an ESP32 running ESPHome would extend the Bluetooth range and act in a kind of mesh, but I don’t know if this is even possible with the current Bluetooth standard.
UPDATE: Just found out my ideas were also requested in the blog post last WTH so these are not new ideas.