Echo as Text-To-Speech

[jkmonroe]

I learned that the Echo does bluetooth streaming, meaning that it will maintain a persistent connection to a paired device, but also work as expected with voice/music. I tested it, and it seems to work great - if you play something from the master server, it will play on the Echo, and when it is done playing, whatever the Echo was doing will resume (playing Pandora, TuneIn, Spotify).

Now I need to figure out how to really start using the distributed nature of CQC and configure BT on a tablet in my bedroom to the Echo.

I *think* this could mean we would have location specific TTS announcements, or just hit all of the drivers simultaneously for multi-room.

More testing to come ...

[Dean Roddey]

As long as the Echo looks like a standard DirectSound type audio output, the TTS driver should work fine with it.

[jkmonroe]

Yeah, it works from my master server. I've never really used distributed servers in my setup, so I need to learn what I need to install to get drivers on IV tablets.

[Dean Roddey]

You don't necessarily have to have the TTS driver on the tablets. If you just enable the IV control interface, you can send some commands directly to the IVs (without having to go through the IV control driver even.) One of those commands is to have it speak text.

[jkmonroe]

really, ill have to mess around with that tomorrow. will that work as long as the IV is open?

[Dean Roddey]

Yeh. Since it's happening in the foreground session, it's just going to speak out whatever the default audio output for speech is set up in Windows on that machine.

[joeberg]

JKMonroe,

Did you ever get TTS (zoned or not) working reliably with an Echo? I haven't yet bit the Echo bullet but if I could do zoned TTS with it, I would be in. Since I moved, I haven't had TTS. I previously had it setup with a Russound with an audio override channel but would really prefer not to setup wired speakers, etc.

I am looking at Sonos and Echo and am just looking for the best option available that won't break the bank with TTS being one of my main objectives.

Thanks for any info!

[jkmonroe]

Working? Yes. Reliably? No.

I think the best solution right now is a Sonos Play:1 ($160) and an Echo Dot ($40), but you'd need either a Connect/Amp/Play:5 to get the line-input for TTS, or use a streaming server like Icecast (which is what I am doing).

[potts.mike]

It's not available publicly yet but there are some "blessed" skills that provide text to speak directly through Alexa. I suspect that after a period of testing this will be rolled out to the public API but, again, it's not yet available.