When playing music on my Nest Hub devices using Plex, I wanted some way to show the photo screensaver again, while keeping the Plex music playback in the background.
So far I couldn’t find a clean way to achieve this with Home Assistant. Yet, I was able to build a Routine in the Google Home app that can be triggered and which activates the photo screensaver while keeping the Plex media playback in the background.
The routing just needs to trigger a custom command “Go to ambient” (using the Routine action ‘Add your own command’).
When executing this same command using Google Assistant SDK, the media playback was interrupted and a message indicated screen navigation is not supported via the SDK.
Yet, the Google Home routine can be triggered whenever some device state changes.
Using the trick explained in this post a custom switch can be defined in Home Assistant which will become available in Google Home app. A similar approach is possible by creating a virtual switch device via Tuya. So the routine can then be tiggered by switching the state of the custom switch and the photo screensaver will be activated by the routine without interrupting media playback.