I have basic TTS working with WallPanel and the official companion app but they both use what I’d call device level TTS (rendered on the receiving device itself) so it’s very robotic. I want to use the smoother Google or Nabu Casa TTS. That appears to require a media_player device to send to.
I have tried browser_mod and while I’ve got it connected to the Android table and can darken the display on the tablet or my desktop browser I can’t get either to play sound via tts.cloud_say the service fires fine but no sound comes out of the browsers. On top of that when my Android tablet goes to sleep it browser_mod entity becomes unavailable which makes it kind of useless.
Seems more complicated and clunky to get the smoother TTS to play on a device like an Android tablet than it should be. Suggestions?
the companion app does indeed use on device TTS because it uses the standard android API. Have you tried looking at the TTS settings on your device itself to download new voices and adjust the TTS output?
This is one of those beautiful cases where there is a very simple solution that was overlooked. I come from a mostly Apple / iOS ecosystem where the on device text-to-speech options are not great and there really isn’t an option to change them. I didn’t even know/think to look for a setting like this and did not come across this kind of option in my research.
My Samsung Galaxy Tab A running One U 3.1 / Android version 11 allows me to choose “Speech services by Google” instead of the default “Samsung text-to-speech engine”. I now have very natural sounding TTS on my wall panel without changing a single thing in HA or installing or configuring apps or hacks.
I’m using Amazon Fire tablets and sadly don’t have the same functionality. I’ve tried downloading additional voices but they all come out as the same robotic sounding one.
I do have a Nabu Casa subscription but can’t figure out how to configure WallPanel as a valid Media Player in Home Assistant.
