I am new to Home Assistant. I would like to have a Google Home Mini to read out loud my notification. (ex. “You have left your window open in the bedroom!” )
I get that I should use tts but, i do not want to pay a monthly fee for a google or amazon cloud service. Is there a way to buy a Google home mini and use its built in TTS for it to read out notifications sent by Home assistant (without paying a monthly fee)?
If there is, how should I configure it? I see several threads of people using it with google.say, but they are all setting up tts platforms and ddns in hassion configuration. I dont get why is it needed to set up a connection to google on home assistant, if the home mini should handle the communication with googles tts service.
I could be wrong but the Google Home devices are just picked up as Google Cast devices with the Google Cast integration.
That’s free.
If you want your Home Assistant devices to show up in Google Assistant with little effort that’s where the Nabu Casa membership picks up.
There is a free way to do that as well.
It doesn’t seem too too hard but I’ve done similar things for getting Assistant-Relay working already.
I’m a cheapskate for sure but knowing my payment goes to support this great project and it’s employees helps me feel better about those few dollars leaving my wallet.
Hi there. I use this addon in NodeRED for the speech output of a text. I saved a text as “msg.payload”. This is then sent to a Google Home through the add-on and the audio output takes place. It’s a great thing. Good luck with creating the flow…
Sorry, first of all welcome to the forum!
Thank you for all the responses. My home assistant is just in the process of installing NodeRED, while I was reading your responses . Thanks for all the help, ill look into both solutions.
In fairness I use Node Red to do TTS on my Google Home devices as well, but that’s only because HA TTS stopped working for me a while ago.
It magically works now.
Home Assistant TTS is a bit nicer because you’re not speaking through an unnamed IP Address and a port.
One issue I have with HA Google Cast is it keeps detecting my existing speaker groups as new speaker groups and adding _2, _3, _4 to it each time.
Not frequently, but often enough…
My router doesn’t allow me to assign devices with the same hostname different static IPs, so I’m barred from testing if it’s a dhcp issue without buying a better router.
I don’t think they have changed their IP addresses when this happens though…
At my home all I have are Echo’s, much better at TTS, any music playing doesn’t stop.
At the office I have 1 Google mini, and HA on HyperV and just the office lights.
No subscriptions, just tuya connection for the lights. Can’t be bothered flashing them.
So I’m a bit puzzle at your concerns as I have no issues using TTS at the Office from HA. There are no subscriptions. The only issue for me is that it stops play.
And as I said Alexa doesn’t doesn’t do that. And I don’t think I would need any at home either if I didn’t want it there as well.
Hello everyone, My google home mini have just arrived. I am trying to find a way to push notifications to it but all I could find is tts.google_translate service. Which does the job, but It does not use the same quality tts as the home mini has built in. I like the default voice of the home mini.
Just so you would understand my setup. I have a Hassio with zigbee2mqtt and xiaomi sensors. I want an automation that would let me know if I have left the window open for more then x minutes.
I have everything setuo, I just wanted to have a TTS service that google home can read out. the google translate solution actually pushes an mp3 to the media device. While it gets the job done, I am not found of the quality of the voice that google translate produces. I want the home mini to do the tts.
Hi there. The voice that is reproduced by NodeRED on the Google Home actually sounds quite good. (I have the German voice output!). I created a flow for testing and it works as expected. I don’t want to upload it in detail, then you learn the most by trying it out. But I am happy to help if necessary. There is definitely another, or easier way, but this one works. Good luck creating your flow !!!
And here is the screenshot …
I use Google Cloud TTS, with the volume of requests I have, the free tier is way more than enough and the quality (sounds more natural) is awesome. You chan check my TTS config here and the script I use to send notifications there.
I use a script so I can set the volume before sending the notification. I happened to miss some notifications because my GF just set the volume too low (or too high!).
You can find HA’s TTS docs here, and Google Cloud Platform docs there.
My google home mini’s stopped playing tts for a month for now. My Chromecast devices are working as usual. I think it might have something to do with a recent firmware update. Any one else having issues?
Thank you
edit: Removing and adding the google cast integration seemed to work.
Yes, I’ve also been having issues for a while now with tts. Just today I’ve figured it out, I had to define a base_url in my tts: configuration, but not only that, it didn’t like my external url, so I had to define my local IP instead.
Every time I had it set with my external url, it would trigger a beep to the google home mini, but wouldn’t playback the actual file. Changing it to my internal url fixed this. Funnily, if i access the cached tts file through my external url, it would play fine in the browser.
It’s strange I tried this a while ago to fix my issues and then I just tried again and now it works. Thanks for making me try again.
The issue even followed me to a new Operating System for HA…
It turns out the problem is most likely due to wifi channel. What I was experiencing was this, both my chrome casts work all the time. One google mini in my bedroom works, one at the house entry does not. Most my tts’es were handled my the entry google mini so I thought just change the google mini’s places. Interestingly, the non working one when put in my bedroom started to work, and the one put to the entry stopped working. This made me think this was a wifi issue. Recently I’ve changed the wifi 5G channel to 40. After changing back to channel 44, everything seems to be working now. Interestingly channel 44 is crowded (one more neighbor) but channel 40 is free.
. Thanks for all the help, ill look into both solutions.
