I am thinking about taking the plunge and upgrading to a HP23.
However, I am contemplating how to best get a reliable speach output from it, given that Athom decided to remove the speaker.
Currently, I am using the speaker in my HP19 to tell me to get up in the morning, together with an Alexa announcement and music in the house. (Using @Jamie Peake’s app. Thank you to @Darrell_Etherington for his reply down below, which allowed me to realize that my initial post was not clear on this.) The reason for the combination is that Alexa’s servers work reliably 95% of the time, but for the final 5% it is nice to have that speaker backup in the Homey itself. (I do not think the fault is in the app on the Homey side.)
When I switch to HP23, I will loose that speaker backup. What are your recommendations for a very reliable way of getting speech “out” of HP23?
Hmmm I use Google mini’s and it works great overall. But probably some announcements get lost in space as well, I did not check that, so no number on fails.
I use this app for speech
I am using Sonos Era 100. There is a Sonos App for the HP23 which work great for any text to speech automations and also to start, stop music playing etc.
I’m using Alexa’s with the Jamie Peak App and they are very stable, allows you to direct output to specific area (I’ve got one in each room) or as an announcement. Jamie is also very good at support and adding new versions when they are relased. Alexa or Google I guess is a personal choice but I find them pretty good so far.
Darrell
That is what I currently use as well. Jamie Peake is a very hard working contributor. I do not think that the dropouts that I am experiencing is anything but glitches at the Amazon end.
I now see that I was unclear in my initial description and that it could be interpreted as not using Jamie’s app.
Just to add, I’m on the EU setting and a few months back I did have some drop outs and Jamie confirmed most probably Amazon end. It has now calmed and it is a long time since I last reset App or had to re-enter creditials so pretty sure it will be Amazon end. It does also buffer some stuff, if you send a lot of messages quickly there are some delays, I built some delays into my flows to allow time to settle between messages etc.
Darrell
I’m using 5 secs which is probabably too much but does work. Also, If I want an announment that doesnt state the device that triggered it i.e. all units just speak afer the chime then I do that via an Alexa routine and use Homey to trigger it (works very well) - see example below.
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