I love to tinker as much as the next person on making things work I even cobbled together local TTS using Lannouncer on a old Moto phone tied to a aging intercom line input from the headphone jack on the phone.
So many homes today have a Amazon or Google smart speakers and each time I look at the amount of work one has to jump into to stand up simple TTS on these devices forces me to say sorry no TTS this month. I have looked at DLNA, standing up Pi's, using cloud services, etc. and the are all are too complex to support TTS in a non-geek location. It's great that Hubitat can support many web methods to send out the TTS but the issue is the processing end to the output device.
If there is a simple solution to say use a Amazon device natively with TTS and I missed it can someone point me in the right direction?
The easiest, no custom code, way to accomplish this is to use Virtual Contact Sensors as Alexa Routine Triggers. In the Alexa Routine, add an action to speak whatever phrase you'd like.
Thanks for the suggestions folks. Alexa routines makes me edit in multiple locations along with not leveraging the Hubitat's ability to put together a string that can be spoken.
The Direct integration is interesting but looking at the code you need a NodeJS service up and running and cookie renewals. Still a bit Rube Goldberg and reading though the comments debugging issues would be an issue.
The native Chromecast integration (beta) supports TTS on any google smart speaker, display, nest wifi point or chromecast device.
Works great, simple to use and has been very reliable for me.
If Amazon or Google would just allow API access to the TTS engine for their service it would make things so much easier. But we know both companies have moved away from this model and want to be the hub of all home automation.
