Use TTS with Sonos (not Play:5)

[IVB]

I think a few folks here are doing TTS with Sonos. Is that true? If so, how are you doing it?

I'm ripping out my Concerto. It was used when I bought it in '06, and at this point only half the zones are working. Going to an all Sonos setup. 

One thing that the wife used to really like was the wakeup announcement with "Good morning, its 6:30am, time to get out of bed. The temperature is currently XXX, forecast of YYY".  I want to put that back.

The sticky wicket will be that the master bedroom is going to have the Sonos Playbar, no analog line in. It would be nice to figure out how to get the Sonos Connect in other rooms (or Play:1) to also be able to receive TTS.

[Dean Roddey]

It has an analog input, so presumably you'd use that. But you'd have to switch the Sonos to that, do the TTS, then switch it back.

The TTS driver explicitly supports this sort of thing, via a set of global actions it calls to prep for speech, just before it happens, and after it is done. So you'd set up the TTS driver's audio output to one that is feeding the Sonos analog input, and set up the global actions appropriately to switch to the input and then to go back to regular input.

[IVB]

The Playbar doesn't have analog input, only the Play:5.

[jkmonroe]

oh man, i had a post on how i did it a while ago if you want to search.

but the gist is i used icecast and a loopback audio driver to make my own local-only streaming station and added it to my sonos favorites. when you wanted to call tts just call the favorite in sonos. it had maybe a 2 second delay.

*i dont use it anymore but still have it setup if you want to see it on the next webinar. i also have the driver for the audio loopback and other software needed.

[IVB]

Oy. I vaguely remember that, never could get it to work. Didn't try mind numbingly hard though.

Mr Google shows some method using Python, but after the first few lines I stopped reading. Didn't seem very flexible.

[batwater]

Perhaps if you grouped a Connect (with its line in selected) to the Playbar and/or the Play 1 as the master and played the TTS it would work? It would be easy enough to test...

[IVB]

Perhaps if you grouped a Connect (with its line in selected) to the Playbar and/or the Play 1 as the master and played the TTS it would work? It would be easy enough to test...

Hmmm. Sonos claims you can distribute on a grouping. I don't have a Connect near a PC, that'll take some thinking.

[potts.mike]

Smartthings can send tts directly to a sonos speaker....