Audio announcements?

Hi. I'm new to Hubitat but I'm loving thing so far. One thing I have yet to see an obvious route for is audio announcements? My wife really likes that our alarm announces when one of our doors is opened or closed. I have a bunch of zigbee door sensors connected at working, that seems easy, but what is a good solution for the audio? For bonus points, if it could flash a simple light, that would be fantastic.
Thanks in advance

There are many ways of doing this, I use a Raspberry Pi with VLCThing. Here is a thread with different options. Speaker recommendation for notifications

See the native Notifications app. Personally, I use bptworld's Notification Plus because I can modify its child app to suit us.

I'm using "Echo Speaks" through my Amazon devices (Dots, Show 5s and Firesticks) ... Took me a while to figure out how to get it installed but seems to work really good, Haven't used any of the on-board utilities with it- Just an interface from Hubitat to Alexa.

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I use the built-in Chromecast integration app to announce over my Google Home devices ("The mail has arrived").

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If you've got Sonos Integration hooked up, you can also send text to those devices. The "Play Text And Restore" function works great for announcements.

Here is my audio rule for all doors but the garage door.

Here is my rule for garage door audio notification, with a bonus red light for my office. (I have other lights that turn red when my garage door is open, but they are handled by the individual room lighting rules).
image

The audio file needs to be hosted on a webserver like location, in my instnace, on my Synology Diskstation. I have different sounds for garage door and other doors.

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Yes, many many choices depending on your specific requirements, time and effort.
Searching for TTS (text to speech) will yield a lot of holiday reading :blush:
Personally I have a Google Home Mini notifying me of door and window status along with welcome greetings, random announcements such as “it really is time you left for work” and hourly notifications.

Thanks for all the info! I think I have a direction now. I'm leaning toward VLCThing with rules like Mike is using. I guess I just have a healthy amount of work to do. :slight_smile:

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Ditto. Easy to set up, you get many different voices to choose from, and you can even target specific GH for specific announcements.

Actually, I don't know where this forum stands on deal posting, but Amazon has the dot on sale for $0.99 with 1 month of their music service. I'm going to try doing that and breaking the microphone. :slight_smile:

Why break the microphone, just mute it using the mic mute key. I don't think that Amazon would risk being that nefarious and still listen even if the user muted the mic! :slight_smile:

Ha, didnt know there was a simple button for mute. That makes it even easier.. :wink:

can you post how you got this working? i have gone round in circles trying to figure this out

This thread is a year and a half old... perhaps better results if you head directly to the thread for Echo Speaks.

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