Hello Home Assistant Community,
I need a speaker so I can play tts messages. The speaker doesn’t have to have a particularly good sound, but it should be easy to integrate into home assistant. Maybe one of you knows what the solution would be.
Best regards ET Craft
If you already have some speakers with Aux/optical in in then you can look at one of these to plug in and tell HA to stream to: https://www.amazon.com/WiiM-Mini-Multiroom-Preamplifier-Assistants/dp/B09HC5GRKY, else just get a USB speaker to plug into the host device like this one that I use for my setup to load up white noise when I am heading to sleep and play my doorbell chime through: https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Speakers-Desktop-Crystal-Included/dp/B09NX6G7L1.
How do I set up the USB speaker on the HA host?
You just plug it in and set the volume, I have mine set to 80% in windows on my nuc since my HA instance is running in a virtualbox instance.
I installed homeassistant on a NUC without a virtual box but as the main operating system
You manage the volume via the automation then when you set the speaker as the output once you have tested that its working.
Do I need an integration?
To play audio you will need to have the VLC plugin installed at least, I have that and the spotify plugin’s installed for my uses.
The VLC plugin allows me to play my doorbell chime file saved to the media folder (you can use files via network share if you have that setup in the share settings of your HA install).
Keep in mind if you want to have the same audio file play on your phone or other device you need to have that file on said device and call the channel it will be tied to at the time in the companion app in the automation. i.e
I have my VLC integration labeled as speaker for ease of assignment in automations.
For TTS you will use this:
Thank you very much, you helped me a lot
