TTS, Sonos & Internet Outages

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1

All, I'm using Sonos with TTS, and it's working great, but i have a question brought to mind by a comment about Sonos accounts in another thread.

During a recent extended internet outage (semi self inflicted) at my home, I found sonos to be unusable, even for playing media from my local media server.

If the internet is down, doe sonos work for TTS? Has anyone run into this yet?

Scott

2

Yes and no. So HE uses cloud services to create the text to speech. So if the text to speech is new and you do not have internet then no. BUT, HE also caches recent text to speech so if it is something that is commonly announced and is cached then yes it would announce.

3

Yes as Aaron said. it works as long as the TTS message has already been played recently and automatically cached to your hub. My Hub and a few sonos zones are on a second battery backup. Its a trip when the power is out and the lights wont turn on, but if you open a door you still get the TTS messages!

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4

Thanks guys, glad you explained.

So that begs the question, is there an alternative? Could I run a local TTS engine (presuming such a thing exists), and connect that as an output destination?

Not that it's a big deal, I rarely suffer Internet outages, so probably really just a curiosity thing...

Again, thanks.
S.

5

Again HE uses Amazon speech services for text to speech. So unfortunately none that I am aware of.

6

Thanks Aaron,

I've been digging, there are a few open source TTS engines, but it's a non-trivial thing for sure.

I'll continue researching, but it seems like there are several obvious problems with local TTS:

  1. Quality (the good engines are resource intensive)
  2. Hardware Requirements, Likely too much for a Pi, probably need something better.
  3. Interfacing with Sonos & Elevation.

Might be a fun sort of back burner project to play with.

Scott

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