Use echo speaks
While I am going to continue to investigate alternatives I am happy to say my crude workaround of doing initialize() plus playTrack(silent mp3) every 4 minutes is working tolerably well. I may yet have a connectivity failure and Hub meltdown as @Jost has described but it has not happened yet. 
I have never heard bloop before playback starts.
A couple of times, days apart, I heard a bloop for no reason. I didn't check the logs but that must mean that somehow, the message didn't get through and the speaker fell asleep. Maybe the keep-alive needs a timing adjustment or added delay.
I'll also refine the rules so the keep-alive action plays at minimal volume in case a bloop gets through somehow, and explicitly set volume in notifications.
This is ridiculous, but at least it's working.
I also updated the title of this thread to reflect where it went, not how it started.
1 Like
Following exactly the documentation (App Configuration - Echo Speaks Documentation),,,
Everytime I try "Step 7" of the "Server Configuration" I just get a "404" Page, 
As I already said:
"Alexa TTS by Hubitat is very ... cumbersome"
Months later, here's another update.
Over time I found the Google device to be less reliable than I would like, even with the keep-alive hack. Several times a week I would miss notifications, or the device might just fall silent until I rebooted the hub.
Fortunately a friend sent me an old disused Sonos speaker and as others said, it works very well for this purpose.
Had to scroll back to see if I already commented here. I might have posted this in another thread a while ago...
If you're have a machine where you can run Node Red, I've had good luck with the cast integration in Node Red.
I threw together a device driver that lets me send notification messages to Node Red via HTTP requests. It then sends the messages to the speakers. I don't use TTS much now because the Google lady's voice freaks the dog out, but when I was using it, it was reliable.
I have it set up to capture the volume of each speaker, send the TTS at the volume specified in the request, then reset the volume to its prior value afterwards. I never attempted to keep the connections alive to prevent the 'bloop' at the beginning.
I still use it daily to play a doorbell sound when someone approaches the front door. It can play any sound from any URL the speakers can reach. I have the doorbell mp3 stored on the Raspberry Pi that hosts Node Red.
The connection to each device is constantly monitored and I get notified if one drops. That doesn't happen often, but I've sometimes had to unplug and re-plug some of the speakers to reset them.
In my case, avoiding the bloop was the impetus for the whole project, haha.
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
