Why won't HA use bluetooth speakers?

Month of "What the heck?!"
21

Another option.
Home assistant in docker on a debian host.
Bluetooth speaker connected to the host (bluetoothctl).
I use bluealsa to play notifications on these speaker from a script:

#!/bin/sh
amixer -D bluealsa sset 'EE4295 - A2DP' 100%
aplay -D speaker-1 /home/user/soundfiles/3.wav &
exit 0

And then from docker I excecute this script on the host via ssh als with a script:

#!/bin/sh
ssh -F /config/.ssh/config intelnuc "/home/user/bin/play-sound.sh"
exit 0
22

All these solutions are excellent.

… but… I would love to know the demographics of HA users as far as willingness to deploy some complex solutions (think ‘what is that thingy on the screen?’ vs ‘i hand coded Arch for fun this morning.’)

My conjecture is that there are way more in the left tail of the distribution, then on the right.

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23

I believe that the majority lie somewhere in between those two points. They understand technical concepts, but may not be hardcore coders.

24

Just got a JAM Classic 2.0 Bluetooth speaker to work with a Raspberry (running the HA operating system). No Bluetooth dongle needed, runs with Pi4 internal bluetooth.
Audio Notifications with TTS work like a charm now.

See GitHub - adrgumula/HomeAssitantBluetoothSpeaker: Home Assistant and Bluetooth speakers (based on the Xiaomi Mi Compact BLE Speaker 2 XMYX02YM)

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25

I’m glad that guide exists, however the fact that it has 41+ steps to get it working, and even then only with specifically ProxMox, is a clear sign that this process needs to be made simpler for mere mortals.

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26

No ProxMox in my setup, it runs on a Pi with the HA operating system. No Bluetooth dongle needed, runs with Pi4 internal bluetooth.
Took 5 minutes to get it running… I just added that info to original post.