Sonos Cloud API - Better alerts & TTS

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96

Just to be clear, I think this (change to tts announcements) is a ‘good thing’.

However it seems like a retrograde step to remove (and effectively show incorrect) information. If the media player is playing surely it’s state should show that, likewise the attributes should reflect the reality?

I could see an argument (which I still wouldn’t agree with) that an announcement over media already playing might not update the state and attributes, but if the player is paused and then starts playing the state is literally wrong.

Wouldn’t it be better to make the announce an option for tts in the same way as it is for play_media? That way you can choose to announce or stick with the old snapshot, unjoin, join, restore.

I also agree with this:

If I’m playing loud music, I don’t want my announcements to be loud, and vice versa if my music is quiet background music, I might want my announcements louder so that I hear them properly.

97

The state of the media_player should reflect any music currently playing and should not be interrupted to show the overlay sound (which does not stop playback of the music anymore). Having to determine/store/restore the state of the media was honestly a ridiculous workflow, but it was the only way it could be accomplished before. This new method which overlays the audio on top is far simpler and I’d argue what most users would expect to happen if they didn’t know the history.

This is described in the documentation here. You can use the volume parameter to set the volume specifically for the announcement without interfering with currently playing music. For TTS, you’ll need to use a special TTS Media Source URL like so:

service: media_player.play_media
target:
  entity_id: media_player.sonos
data:
  media_content_id: >
    media-source://tts/cloud?message="I am very loud"
  media_content_type: music
  announce: true
  extra:
    volume: 80

This new behavior is only when announce is set. If you’re set on using the old behavior, use TTS like above and leave out the announce parameter.

98

I think the new function is great if you use TTS via Play_Media it works great. You no longer need complicated processes to sign the announcements. You don’t have to worry about whether or on which players something else is being played.

Try out the function, then a lot becomes clearer, it was the same with me. For me, only one way is missing to recognize when playing an announcement in order to be able to play several rear side without cutting off.

Often you want to play signal and then play a message, which is difficult if you don’t have an event what the end of every announcement reports.

99

Yes I completely agree!
I was an early adopter of your integration and I liked it a lot.

I do have cases where (at the moment) I will still need to use snapshot etc. and read the state and attributes but I won’t go into that now.

I need to look properly into your reply, I think it may well at the very least provide me with workarounds until I decide to try and rewrite my routines to suit the new behaviours.

Thanks for the replies.

100

Ok, I’ve thought this through a bit more and I have an issue which I don’t think can be covered.
How can we deal with ‘announcement clash’?

If an announcement is made and before it is finished another one is requested the first will, I believe be cut short when the second one starts.

This was always a problem in the past but was worked around by checking for playing, paused or idle or by using media_duration in a wait.

I used this technique to make long messages sound a lot more natural by imposing a pause between sections.

Specifically, for example I have a morning greeting that has many parts…

Weather
News headlines
Bins and other reminders
Whether Arsenal have a match today (:slight_smile: )
etc. etc.

There is no way that I know of (please correct me if I am wrong!) to create a pause in a TTS announcement, so as my script combines all the sections of the announcement it inserts a token where I want a pause. The script splits the message at the tokens and plays each one in a separate tts call with a delay between them equal to the number of ‘pause tokens’ inserted at that point.

e.g.
“This is the weather.[PAUSE]This is the news.[PAUSE][PAUSE]This is the bin reminder.”

Would give a one second pause between the weather and the news, and a two second pause between the weather and the bin reminder.

The script has a wait between announcements for the previous one to finish.

I know this may sound over engineered but when you hear the announcement every day it makes a difference when it sounds more natural. Without the pauses it is just a constant stream of talking.

I don’t believe this is possible any longer.

PS. Yes I could do away with my overengineered pauses and have separate announcements but that doesn’t solve the problem that there is no way of knowing when it is ‘safe’ to start the next one.

Unless of course I have missed something fundamental?

101

Currently that’s true, there’s no indication when an announcement has finished playing. Perhaps I can find a way, but no promises.

2 Likes
102

Thanks, It’d be great if you could.
I know this question came up a lot in several threads a few years ago and the only solutions were as I said to using the player state or the duration attribute.

I suspect quite a few people will want this even if it just to stop ‘announcement clash’.

103

Having use this now for a few days I really do urge you to consider a way to know when an announcement is playing and has ended.

I think it is actually very important.

One (perfect?) solution I can think of would be to add attributes to the media_player such as

- announcement: [true, false]
- announcement duration: x seconds

I don’t have a very deep knowledge of developing for HA so i admit that I have no idea if that is feasible?

I also have another issue (I think).

When using tts.cloud_say am I right in thinking that if the announcement is sent to several players (Sonos) they will not play in synch?

I know this was a limitation of the original integration and was the main reason I only made limited use of it. (As well as wanting my announcements to stay local and not pass through the Sonos organisation).

I may be doing something wrong but I am getting small but significant and annoying delays between each player which makes it sound like an echo if you are in earshot of more than one player.

104

Ok… another update…

I have now found out that there is very generous free tier for the Google Cloud TTS service (the same one used by Nabu Casa).

As you can imagine from a Google implementation it offers a vast array of customising of the TTS output.

Including:

  • Inserting pauses
  • Inserting audio files in sequence in the TTS (Perfect for small a small ‘ding-dong’ preceding the announcement.

These extras do require the text to be sent in SSML format but that is not a very onerous task. Normal text is sent as, erm, normal text.

The only downside is that you need to jump through a few hoops to set it up initially and provide billing information to Google in case you go over the free allowance (unlikely in my opinion for HA announcements and it seems that at that point you need to opt-in to billing anyway).

I used this website as a source of reference and it a was all fairly painless.

I haven’t yet done much testing but… fingers crossed!

Anyway, this probably means my only outstanding problem is ‘announcement clash’ and now that I can build pauses into a single annou9ncement it is much less of an issue (for me at least. I still think this will be an annoyance to others).

Anyway, this still means there are outstanding problems,

  • ‘announcement clash’ but now that I can build pauses into a single announcement it is much less of an issue (for me at least. I still think this will be an annoyance to others).
  • and of course not being able to group media players

PS. Yes I do see the irony in using Google Cloud after saying this: :wink:

EDIT: So far not bad, except I can’t get it to play an embedded local sound file. Probably some kind of security restriction somewhere. Shame as that would have been brilliant.

105

As far as embedding a local sound file, you should try using the custom integration Chime TTS which allows you to add a sound file at the start and/or the end of the TTS message. The integration locally combines them into a single file so there’s no lag during playback

106

I’m trying to use this with Node Red to send announcements when my doorbells are pressed. I can make it work using Developer Tools, to call the service, but I can’t seem to figure out the syntax in Node Red for the JSON. Here is what I’m using in Dev Tools. Any ideas?

service: media_player.play_media
data:
  entity_id: media_player.deck_sonos_move
  media_content_id: >-
    media-source://tts/cloud?message=The front door bell has been pressed.
  media_content_type: music
  extra:
    volume: 50
107

Now that many of the features are now included in core HASS, it looks like lots of people are converting automations to use the original media player entities.

Just wondering if volume is something I can control with core integrations now?

108

Yes. See the examples in the documentation: Sonos - Home Assistant.

109

Thanks for the info, but no matter what I try I can’t get it to work.

More specifically, I’m trying to automatically adjust volume of a TTS mesage sent to Sonos. My partner often turns volume of speakers down to zero instead of unpairing them from the group and so this weather notification is often played silently.

Whenever I try to add ‘volume’ or ‘extra: volume:’ anywhere in this data_template section I get an ‘extra keys not allowed @ data[‘extra’]. Got None’ error.

service: tts.speak
data_template:
  cache: false
  media_player_entity_id: media_player.sonos_roam
  message: >-
    The weather for today is a maximum of {{
    states('sensor.karabar_test_temp_max_0') }} degrees, {{
    states('sensor.karabar_test_extended_text_0') }}
  language: en
target:
  entity_id: tts.google_en_com
110

You can’t use that directly inside plain TTS calls. Look at the second example for how to use volume with TTS messages.

111

Hello,

I try to play a mp3 sound from my sonos. I hear the normal music is going to background (lower volume) but the mp3 will not be played.
I put the mp3 in /www/media/ and use the following service:

service: media_player.play_media
data:
  media_content_id: //www/media/spooky_halloween_with_thunder.mp3
  media_content_type: music
target:
  entity_id: media_player.kantoor_cloud

there is no error in dthe log about a unknown sourde directory.
Why will the mp3 not play?

112

Hi, i’m using the announce: true feature which works well.
However I have a setup with a pair of 2 era100’s and a sonos arc paired with 2 era300. The announce feature only works for 1 speaker in a stereo pair and only for the arc (not the era300). I’ve read somewhere that you can use play_on_bonded: true under extra to activate the paired speakers. However it doesn’t seem to work for me when using announce: true . Any idea how that can be solved?

113

This was a feature in the custom integration, but not (yet) available in the native integration. The behavior would sometimes lead to out-of-sync alerts in the same room so I was looking for better ways to use the Sonos API to avoid this. I haven’t found a way, so perhaps adding the feature as an opt-in option would be better than nothing.

1 Like
114

Thanks for the explanation and all your work! Would be great to have it indeed as an opt-in option :grin:

115

I’ve had this custom integration hanging around my system for a while now but I’m wondering why.

is there anything in this custom integration that is useful that isn’t available now in the built-in integration?