*** French version ***
Bonjour,
J’aimerais avoir une enceinte connectée (zigbee ?) dans chaque pièce et pouvoir mettre la musique que l’on souhaite dans chaque pièce indépendamment des autres, pouvoir également y connecter un smartphone en bluetooth et bien sur pouvoir gérer HA depuis les enceintes (ferme la lumière etc)
D’ou ma question : que dois je prendre comme enceinte, et ou ? (aliexpress ? autre ?)
Merci pour votre retour
*** ENGLISH VERSION ******
Good morning,
I would like to have a connected speaker (zigbee?) in each room and be able to play the music you want in each room independently of the others, also be able to connect a smartphone via Bluetooth and of course be able to manage HA from the speakers (turn off the light, etc.)
Hence my question: what should I take when pregnant, and where? (aliexpress? other?)
Thank you for your feedback
Hi, welcome to the forum. We would love to help you, but in order for us all to help each other internationally this is an English only forum. Would you be so kind to translate it, if need be using a translations service? There are also French forums if you want to speak your native language.
Hi. Connected speakers to play music are often combined with voice commmand capabilities, but these functions are very much different. I do not thing either one is available for Zigbee. Zigbee is meant for small amounts of data going to IOT devices. Audio is a lot of data.
Bluetooth is suitable for audio. But it requires a music player to send the data to it. Phones have music player apps, Home assistant does not have that functionality, and I also do not know of any custom integrations that allow Home Assistant send music to a bluetooth speaker.
So for functions like these, you often end up with wifi devices that you can cast music to. These devices usually get a URL and are able to get the music from there.
When it comes to voice commands, there is quite some processing power involved to convert audio to text, convert the text to instructions for HA and convert text to speech to say something back.
Devices from Google, Apple and Amazon do this using their cloud services. If that is ok with you then one of their smart speakers is an option. A Google Nest Mini for instance is not too expensive and great, at the cost of loss of privacy. You will also need to expose Home Assistant to the internet in a safe way. Nabu Casa subscription can do that for you or you can do it yourself.
Sonos has great multiroom experience but is very expensive and also relies on cloud services for voice commands capabilities. I do not think it can be used to control other Home Assistant devices though.
If you want fully local smart speaker capability then Home Assistant is also hard at work for you to build and improve that. But it will require either more expensive hardware, or a Nabu Casa subscription (still cloud, but more privacy minded). Home assistant just released new hardware to use as a smart speaker. Personally I have no experience with it.
Either way I think it is very unlikely you can buy something from aliexpress that is affordable and can do the things you hope for using Home Assistant.