All my other voice assistant devices are google and they can play back files.
At the moment I have used ibroadcast on alexa. That gets called in an action and plays back an audio file I uploaded to ibroadcast. Unfortunately I have noticed it doesn't always playback and says there was an access problem.
An alternative I have seen is have hubitat trigger another device to play back a music track and use the echo as a blutotth speaker. This doesn't seem ideal to me.
I am thinking now that I need a google home next to the echo to do the audio file playback more reliably? That would be done using the play track function in hubitat and have a local file on my c7 hub?
I am using the echo purely to detect dog barks. Google home didn't have that function otherwise I would have stuck with google.
Voice Monkey lets you use an internet file and play it on an echo, just not local files on Hubitat. So if you can host your file somewhere, you can play it with Voice Monkey
You can pay a subscription if you want to upload directly to the Voice Monkey Media Library, or just host the file yourself somewhere.
You call Voice Monkey using a web request in RM or Webcore automations. They have a sandbox to build the API call URLs you will call in an automation.
I'm not so sure about that. I'd need to dedicate a single device to play it back I assume as it'll always be connected to it via Bluetooth.. unless I turned Bluetooth on and off in the device based off triggers but that'd add much delay..
It's still something to think about though as I might find something I'm not using.. maybe an old android (non tv) box I have..
I assume the difference with this is it'll play the file from any http source? Do you feel (compared to iBroadcast) it'll be more reliable, faster or omit the announcement Amazon has when playing non Amazon based music? Assuming it won't work from a locally hosted file and needs to be cloud.
Yes, that's the idea. Echo's are cloud devices. I see there are other ways like with the My Media for Alexa app, but ultimately you have to point it to another cloud server where the file is hosted.
I've never used that feature on Voice Monkey, I just assume it works. In general, Voice Monkey was very reliable for making echos speak when I was using it, when I was still on SmartThings and they banned the Echo Speaks app. Now I just use Echo Speaks again on Hubitat.
I did use Voice Monkey last year to make a talking Christmas Tree, as I could choose from a bunch of voices for things the Echo Dot hidden in the branches would say. So, I had a Christmas Tree with an English accent, that triggered on it's water level sensor changing to speak random things about Christmas, and eventually start pleading for water as it got low. I digress, but Voice Monkey is a fun app.
I used a soil moisture sensor for water level. I have some Spruce Zigbee sensors that have about a 5" probe on them, and I was surprised to find that it actually reads the water level as a %, since there is about 5" of water in the bottom of the tree stand.
