I have set up Home Assistant and already have a few Alexa’s sprinkled around my house - but have been going crazy putting dozens of hours in to getting them to stream some kind of audio from Home Assistant. I have the integration and Alexa Media player set up, but… I am giving up. Amazon won’t make it easy, are there any real options for speakers other than having computers or rasberri pi’s set up around the house? That seems like a lot of work.
I would really like to have voice assistants as well, but other than setting up a bunch of separate computers or getting Home Assistant Voice Preview edition there aren’t any real options. I would get the Voice Preview Edition and connect some good speakers to it, but I can’t stream audio to the same device I have a voice assistant set up for. I’ve been trying to do that on my Home Assistant computer for weeks now. I guess I’ve set my priorities to get functional speakers first.
I really only hear about Ikea Sonos speakers, but those are over $200 for each one, so are there really any other options?
You mention “I would get the Voice Preview Edition and connect some good speakers to it, but I can’t stream audio to the same device I have a voice assistant set up for.”
I use the Voice Preview Edition as a voice assistant I occasionally talk to to trigger scripts, but predominately use it for announcements and notifications. I don’t really know what you mean when I quoted you earlier. Is that something different from what I’m doing?
That’s interesting. I have been wanting to play music and sounds, but there seems to be no media options.
I have one computer I have the Wyoming protocol set up with to use my voice assistant with. I’ve looked, and it doesn’t look like there’s a way I can use it as any media player, only for sending voice commands and responses. I assumed the rest of the smart speakers were set up the same way?
Music assistant is the audio solution for HA. Pair it with HA Voice or any esp player/assitant
Currently synced audio is poor. Resonate is the proposed solution but I’m guessing it won’t be ready til summer 26 or so. It works OK with Voice preview so maybe try it out.
Synced audio is not necessary. Any esp paired with any audio amp and speaker sounds amazing. Works well
I added Apple Music to music assistant and can now go to HA >> select player >> select one of my playlists from Apple Music and let it go. It works well and I expect it to get better.
Alexa was better since I could just say “play xx song “. That works but HAs voice control is still a few months from being that good. That said I dumped my Alexa’s and am happier for it.
Thank you for this - I already have Music Assistant set up, and I am trying to find a player to use it with.
I could not get my Alexa working with Music Assistant. I set up the docker image for the API and created a custom skill like I did for Home Assistant, but I’m not sure what’s going through and what’s not. It does not appear as a valid device, and I can’t really play audio through it directly in Home Assistant either - which is what I at least wanted to do.
Regardless, I’ve heard a lot about how much of a pain it is to integrate Alexa with Home Assistant and it doesn’t work sometime, so I am trying to find something better. I’ll look in to esp devices - thank you.
My Wyoming satellite does not really have functionality in home assistant - it only appears as a satellite for the voice assistant. The docker image also completely reserves my speakers so I can’t use it on other applications.
In terms of specific places - I could find almost nothing on this. I believe I saw a couple mentions on forums saying that it is not possible or to use a separate external speaker, but I don’t feel like taking the hours it took to find those to pull them up again.
If you drop the voice component, there are a bunch more options with a wide variety of price points based what you need. There are more feature-rich and powerful devices from WiiM, Acrylic, or Yamaha MusicCast receivers. There are lower cost devices like the Louder-ESP32 , A variety of devices by RasPiAudio, and others.
Adding Alexa is not hard, it’s just doesn’t follow HA logic and quickly becomes a mess as once a device is added it must be manually removed. Alexa pulls in a bunch of sensors that are normally not used and ignored and it just gets to be a mess over time
Esp is great single room solution currently. Voice is good but depends on things.
Speech to phrase STT is great at 3’ for me and MUST TALK LOUD from further away. It’s not area aware which I need to look into.
Something like piper STT is good but lots of gibberish response when TV wakes it up.
AI takes compute or remote. No
Nabu remote work well
Single room audio is currently good. I was gettting some $20usd wave share devices that work well. Audio is equal to first gen echo. You can make squeezlite players (dedicated to audio and response only) and get good synced audio solution until Resonate is available.
HA Voice Preview with resonate worked but seemed to freeze every so often. I didn’t test very long. I think a simple automation to reboot when it occurs could clear that right up.
I got 6 of the $20 devices
3 of the HAVPE
Long term it is better investment
I am using Google Home/Home Assistant (on Home Assistant Green), Spotify and have an Onkyo TR-NX6100 receiver. I’ve had nothing but trouble trying to play music reliably.
My first requirement is to play a specific playlist as I wake up. I’ve selected tracks of exact lengths to synchronize perfectly as Home Assistant turns up the morning lights allowing me to wake up nicely.
I’ve tried many options, including a DNLA server on a miniPC (minidnla), Lyrion Music Server, Google Home automating Spotify, HA Music Assistant and over two years I’ve found no reliable solution.
The Google/Spotify automation is the only thing that has ever worked, but they seem to keep adding AI to figure out what I don’t want. I’ve had that working for weeks at a time, but then it suddenly fails when I made no configuration changes.
I can’t really tell who to blame, Google/Spotify/Onkyo/HA or myself or my home network.
I am willing to purchase all the music, and spend (some) more money on hardware if I am able to reliably automate the ability to play some specific music at some specific time on my external speakers.
@empiremaster
The SpotifyPlus Integration should be able to support the Onkyo TR-NX6100
receiver, if the receiver supports Spotify Connect. When installing, make sure you enable the Chromecast Device Support to enable casting to Google (and Sonos) devices.
Example automation for a 7am wakeup playlist
Start the play of the specified playlist on the “Nest Audio 01” device at 7am every morning.
alias: >-
SpotifyPlus Example - Play Spotify Playlist at 7am
triggers:
- trigger: time
at: "07:00:00"
conditions: []
actions:
- alias: Play Spotify Playlist
action: spotifyplus.player_media_play_context
data:
entity_id: media_player.spotifyplus_todd_l
context_uri: spotify:playlist:6M8n0Sp9895BXEE0MbGPde
device_id: Nest Audio 01
mode: single
Also, per chatGPT you might want to ensure that your Onkyo is using a wired ethernet connection to your network; issues have been reported when wireless connection is used with Spotify.
More Info
Check out the SpotifyPlus Integration; it can do everything that the HA Spotify integration can do, supports Spotify Connect enabled devices (Bose, Sonos, Google Chromecast, Amazon Alexa, Denon, JBL, and more), and provides 95+ custom services that can be used in HA automations and scripts. It also has 10 voice assistant intents that allow you to control the player, play content, manage favorites, etc.
There is also a SpotifyPlus Card user-interface that allows you to control the player, manage your Spotify favorites, as well as search the Spotify catalog. You have to install the SpotifyPlus integration first though, and get it configured before you can use the SpotifyPlus Card.
