I’ve been using HA for a long time, and have a bunch of Google stuff as well, a pair of Max speakers, a pair of the mid-size (I think they just called them Home) speakers, and more mini’s than I remember.
I also have about 4500 tracks of audio in a library (currently Media Monkey).
Back in the day, Media Monkey kept this synchronized to Google Play Music, and I could play any song from a “Hey Google, play xxxx”. Since the switch to Youtube Music this is dead - you can’t sync (anything that I can find), and Google spends half the time telling you to upgrade even though I have all these tracks in my library.
All I want is to be able to voice command a playlist (that’s fairly easy) or songs by title or artist. I have implemented playlists in various ways, e.g. I have a Kodi instance that drives a player piano from Home Assistant by an “Hey Google, Activate Piano Jazz”. These require separate automations, not practical for all 4500 songs (even if I automated the creation, I need a more fuzzy word search than “activate” will really do).
What is the current state of the art? Almond/Ada seems fairly dead, I guess Ada died and Almond became (or is becoming, or is stalled becoming) Genie, but I saw no real indication this is really a solution. I’ve run across a Braina but it doesn’t seem very widely used and is a monthly fee as well (not sure if cloud or local).
I’d also really like to use the mini’s, scattered all over the house, as microphones for any hot word commands, since… well, they are all there all over the house.
Is this still a world where people do a media player on a screen like a tablet, and are not using voice commands?
Or is it now only the realm of streaming music and for-fee services like YTM?
Any suggestions?
Linwood