Today I had another great time trying to get Alexa (via MyMedia for local streaming) to play the music I wanted. What I wanted was Sulphur Aeon. What multiple tries in pronouncing it right for her resulted in was this:
| Heard | Band played |
|---|---|
| sypher eon | Atomic Neon |
| safaera | Frank Sinatra |
| sypher Evo | Devo |
| Safa aon | Sava |
| sci-fi aon | AION |
| salif aan | Can |
| sofaygo | ? |
| cipher ayo | DJ Copper Top |
I want to eventually replace her completely anyway, but I’m not there yet. But I have the hardware for one local smart speaker. Experiences like today helped me realize that depending on the band names one listens to, voice is an atrocious interface for requesting songs. Now the super easy solution would be a bluetooth speaker, but there’s one issue, I still need voice in the kitchen for handsfree unit conversion and timers. That means I need a way to mute the speaker with my voice, which means it somehow needs to be controllable by HA.
Requirements as a list:
- Speaker that either plays music from my phone, or directly from the Jellyfin server (that would be preferable)
- I need to be able to control it via phone or tablet
- HomeAssistant needs some kind of control as well, it doesn’t matter how much, but the minimum would volume control.
Note that I’m right-handed and have two left hands, so a solution that doesn’t involve soldering would be preferable.
Apparently Sonos/SYMFONISK are options, but those are pretty expensive speakers for what I need, and at least some cursory googling tells me that it has issues with Jellyfin because Sonos hates standards. Any other speakers that should work for this?
One issue you’ll run into is that HA can’t stream music over Bluetooth (or couldn’t a few months ago), so you will have to go with a wifi speaker or preamp, or a separate server to stream the audio to a Bluetooth speaker. Or find a python package that you can incorporate into HA through the app daemon add on, or a docker image to run as an add on.
You can probably use HA to do the voice processing and send the command to the streaming server, but I haven’t played with the voice feature enough to tell you how much of a pita it would be to set it up to reliably be able to decipher a band, album, or song from a voice command. I do know that it’s a hassle to do it in rhasspy (you have to specify each option, iirc).
Once you do get it set up, you can probably set up a custom media player entity to control playback.
I’ve been checking on native HA Bluetooth streaming on a regular basis, because I want to design a whole home audio system that will follow me from room to room.
You misunderstand. I don’t want my voice for music selection anymore ;) All I want is for HA to be able to mute the speaker when I want to use my voice for something different. Bluetooth is not even a preference, that would only be the worst case of streaming from my phone instead of Jellyfin.
Oh, then that’s super simple with the media player entity.
But wouldn’t that bring me back to my question of what speaker to use?
Mute the speaker or its source? Muting source can be done easy with batch scripts and or an API I’d say.
There’s some fun stuff like ssh with a command in a string to a machine to execute the command. The sender would be your HA device or that you tell “mute”
I don’t really mind either way, but I feel like you and sibling commenter are thinking of something obvious that is eluding me: What speaker do I get?
The same as you have already?
Alexa? :D