I have Homeassistant as my domotics platform of choice and have settled (for now) on using Google cylinders as endpoints for voice control. The AmpliPi will be replacing several Google Audios once I have it working properly. I have installed the HACS plugin on HA and am now trying to enable simple voice control.
My primary scenario is as follows. In the kitchen, I “encantate” the following: “Hey Google, play CBC radio”. This then plays CBC Radio 1 (Canadian public radio) on the Google Audio I have linked to the Kitchen cylinder. Similarily, I will say: “Hey Google, play my favourite songs on pool”. This then plays my liked Spotify songs on the Google Audio device called pool.
Is there a way to emulate this using the AmpliPi and some HA scripts? Would appreciate any thoughts on how best to proceed.
1 Like
We have not looked into how to do this in home assistant yet although we anticipate it being possible and hopefully relatively simple.
I know several guys are pretty deep into Home Assistant already. As far as I can tell @kbkb, @mako, @bshootz, and @bhealey have HA pretty integrated into their setup. Have any of you guys got any Alexa/Google style voice commands working through HA?
If the answer is no, are there any changes we need to make on the API to support this?
I don’t personally use it that way, my setup is done to be free from the “cloud” as much as possible.
This should be doable since you already have the hard part setup. Getting HA to target the AmpliPi device is basically the same as having it target the Google Audio, just giving it the proper entity.
One caveat, you will sometimes lose sync with Spotify and the AmpliPi, the only way I’ve found to fix that is to fire up the Spotify App on the phone so that the App does the discovery. Spotify inside of Home Assistant does not have the local device discovery unfortunately. So if your source stream is changed from Spotify to something else and then back again you’ll have to load the App to see it. If you can leave a source in the AmpliPi set to Spotify all the time then you won’t have as much of a problem.
Edit:
This explains why:
https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/guides/using-connect-web-api/#devices-not-appearing-on-device-list
Following as I might get AmpliPi over the Soundavo WS66i if it has good HA integration. Maybe there have been some updates since last year. Otherwise, I’m not sure what Amplipi would have over Soundavo since I can actually get each of them for the same price or Soundavo slightly less.
Does anyone have good Home Assistant stuff that they could share with us? I’m trying to find how others may be using it in HA versus the web app? I have the integration loaded, but finding it hard to control so far in HA. Would love to find a way to use Siri to turn on/off certain zones and volume control so that it would be easy to use. Right now I find it very cumbersome to use the web app versus speaking to Siri.