IMO, this was 10x too hard to set up. I only wanted to play a doorbell chime MP3.
Terminology was a major issue. With some help, I have stumbled through doing this and want to save others the trouble.
I am running HA on a NUC:
I see no reason why this wouldn’t apply to any other x86 or Pi.
This worked for an old USB speaker, the Jabra SPEAK 410.
First, go to Settings>Add-ons, search for the VLC add-on. Click Install. Click Start.
You do NOT want to install the plain VLC integration. This is where I first got hung up. After you install the add-on, HA should see it and prompt you to set up the VLC media player via Telnet integration automatically from Integrations. Click Install. Click Finish.
Up to here, all was consistent with this video on a Pi host:
That video said it should just work at that point. That wasn’t the case for me. I had to go back to Settings>Add-ons, click on VLC, then Configure at the top. The only window should be Audio. Select the USB speaker for output, click Save, then click Restart. That finally worked.
I have tried to use that same window to switch to the speaker plugged into the headphone jack several times. It only worked once and not in ~5 tries since. I have no idea why.
Finally, if you are in the web interface and playing sounds you’ve uploaded into your Media folder after clicking on Media in the sidebar (see 2:30 in the video), be sure to switch to “VLC-TELNET” using the popup menu at lower right. Mine was set by default to play the sounds through the web browser through which I was connecting to the NUC. Maybe that is a difference between the NUC and the Pi.
Hope this helps someone else.