I have tried and tried to understand and to get TTS working with many different installs. I have looked and looked and found no one place for a new install and to enable TTS. I am in the US.
I have amplified speakers to test and I even have Boise Bluetooth speakers.
As of today I have all my automation setup, on a new Home Assistant OS install with supervisor. Out of the hardware list I have the following:
media1
Subsystem: media
Device path: /dev/media1
Attributes: DEVNAME: /dev/media1
DEVPATH: /devices/platform/soc/fe00b840.mailbox/bcm2835-codec/media1
MAJOR: ‘251’
MINOR: ‘1’
SUBSYSTEM: media
media0
Subsystem: media
Device path: /dev/media0
Attributes: DEVNAME: /dev/media0
DEVPATH: /devices/platform/soc/fe00b840.mailbox/bcm2835-isp/media0
MAJOR: ‘251’
MINOR: ‘0’
SUBSYSTEM: media
Is there someone that could help me set up my TTS?
If you have both of those set up then you use the tts.say service that shows in Developer tools → Services. Exactly what it’s called will depend on your integration choice.
Do not look at the hardware list on the Host tab. You must have, as mentioned above: a player integrated in the HA that creates the entity media_player.xxxxx. Then integrate TTS into configuration.yaml.
For example: Google Translate Text-to-Speech - Home Assistant
I tried installing and connecting to VLC but was unsuccessful, this was with other installs though. I would like to know the easiest player to install and to work would be my next question and next step I suppose.
The media player will be the physical device on which you want to play TTS messages. Accordingly, choose the media player integration of your device if HA supports it
Oh then correct me then, there isn’t a provision to have HA as a media player as well? or it would not be prudent? I should have another server as a media player? I would like to eventually play radio stations as well.
No I don’t want to do anything outside if I can help it. I am willing to do Google TTS or better Microsoft TTS, but control with Alexa or Google Assistant or something like that no.
The LMS server and piCorePlayer are on the local network. If you look, there are a lot of threads with TTS support where you can choose what suits you.
No, your home assistant server isn’t going to be a media player. You need one of the many media player integrations to connect to a supported media player device.
That could be a Sonos speaker, a Google Home device (as a media player, not for voice control), or many many other devices. I mostly use Google Home devices as TTS targets, keeping my Sonos and LMS devices for music.
Ok, so my first step is to obtain or build a media player device or server. I will be building it then on a Ubuntu platform, I suppose. I have my eye on Plex Media Server. I may try
VLC media player Telnet, now that I learn it should be separate from HA.