The project
I’m looking for a minimalistic speaker for my child to listen to their audio books and podcasts on.
The device should have decent audio, but it doesn’t need to be great. It should be able to show an always-on clock when not in use and album art when doing playback. It shouldn’t have a voice assistant feature, or I need to be able to turn it off/remove it.
Current solution
Right now, we’re using an iPod Classic, ca. 2004, and a radio with aux-in. I’ve painstakingly curated a selection of good audio books and podcasts for children, fixed all the tags and added (sometimes created) album art, for all of this to show up nicely in the Cover Flow mode of the iPod. (This was specifically before they could read.)
But there’s so many cables, broken connectors and old batteries involved, I’m now longing for a simpler and cleaner solution…
My research
What I’m originally interested in was a non-smart clock/radio with a display, that can also play local media (let’s say MP3s).
But after some research, I believe those devices don’t exist anymore. I guess there’s no market because everybody’s either streaming audio, or casting from their phones (which my child doesn’t have and won’t get anytime soon!) these days.
Please tell me if I’m wrong and have just missed this kind of device on the market.
It seems that there’s the category “MP3 players”. They have a screen, but they are usually designed to be portable (not to rest on a nightstand) and they come without speakers.
And then there’s the “smart clock” or a “voice assistant with screen” category. They have speakers (albeit often not good ones, because their purpose is to play a wake-up alarm sound, not music or spoken word), but they don’t support (non-Spotify) audio file playback, and they’re primarily controllable by voice.
They either have a speaker but no display, or a display but no speaker (worth mentioning).
Alternatives
I currently suspect my only option is to buy and modify a “smart clock”. To reiterate, my requirements are:
- has a screen, which shows a simple clock when idle
- can select and play back local audio files (or stream them from the NAS – that’s fine, too)
- doesn’t have a voice assistant
- doesn’t have other apps – this should be a single-purpose device (or dual-purpose, if you count reading the time)
Let me clarify that last point: it doesn’t need to be a super secure sandbox. I trust my child and I wouldn’t mind setting up an HA dashboard for them to perform these tasks for example. But I don’t yet want them to have immediate access to a voice assistant and I don’t want them to get the idea that this is now their personal tablet. It should be clear that the device is always standing in the same spot and can be used to play audiobooks, and that’s it.
I’d rather buy something that does what I want out of the box than going the custom route. But I’ve rooted Android phones before and I think I would be able to set up a custom firmware to show a clock and a local audio player, if I cannot solve the problem by throwing money at it.
Here are the smart speakers I’ve looked at so far: (But again, if you can think of a device fulfilling my requirements that’s not even a smart speaker, that’s preferable!)
- Lenovo Smart Clock 2: discontinued and hard to come by here. Was formerly ‘jail-breakable’ to install a local audio player, but might not be anymore. Decent speaker.
- Xiaomi Smart Clock: probably easier to jailbreak, can install custom firmware. Speaker quality is reportedly bad.
- Echo Show series, Nest Hub series: They probably don’t really allow you to disable the voice assistant (because that’s the point of those devices) and they probably also don’t have local audio playback – but I haven’t researched them yet thoroughly.
Links to other projects or devices welcome. Is there a keyword or category I’ve missed? Has something like this been done before? Am I missing something obvious?
