Living with both BigTalker and Echo Speaks

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Hi all -

As someone who came over from SmartThings and bought a couple of Samsung wifi speakers more or less JUST so I could use rayzurbock's awesome BigTalker app, I'm now torn between using BigTalker or Echo Speaks on Hubitat. I more or less have an Echo device in every room in my house at this point.

So right now, basically, I'm sending TTS notifications to BOTH my Echo devices via Echo Speaks and my Samsung wifi speakers via BigTalker... and it can be quite a cacophony.

Both apps are awesome and super powerful and with recent additions to Echo Speaks, there's a lot of overlap between the two.

Echo Speaks seems to be actively in development and the Echo Speaks guys are doing an awesome job adding functionality to it (I just saw the new zones feature added). On the other hand, I think BigTalker is so robust at this point that it's not as actively updated any more... you can't fix what aint broke.

The only thing that concerns me with Echo Speaks is that sometimes it breaks without warning, as it did a short while ago b/c I needed to update my device & app code. I only really noticed b/c suddenly only my Samsung speakers were saying my notifications. So as far as reliability goes, BigTalker seems a more solid choice.

I'm going to continue running both for the time being. Maybe at some point in the future, I'll switch to only using Echo Speaks b/c the Samsung wifi speakers really only are being used for BigTalker and were originally added b/c there was no easy way to get TTS notifications to talk on Echo devices on SmartThings.

Anyone else in the same boat? What did you choose to do?

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BigTalker dev here. I haven't poured much into it lately as family life has been busy AND I haven't received many requests to add additional capabilities/events. The code is pretty modularized now so adding capabilities/events is fairly easy for many types that are natively supported by the platform. I hope the lack of requests is simply the fact that it's working for most people and they haven't found anything else they need/want out of it. A recent YouTube video that I found regarding usage of BT2 is encouraging in that I think people are generally just using it and are happy as-is.

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