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:

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?