Best practice for TTS to groups and time to cast to specific devices?

[dannieboiz]

In Assistant, I have a group called whole house which would play on all devices, is it better to enable that single device "Whole House" group that's created in Google Assistant or select the individual device in the plugin?

Also, there are announcements that needs to go everywhere such as the security alerts and then there are some that I only want for it to go to certain device at certain time of day. What's the best way to set this up?

[spud]

If you use the chromecast group, the TTS will be better synchronized among all your devices than if you pick the individual device in the HS event. That being said some users have some problems to keep the plugin connected to a chromecast group, so my advice would be to select the individual device in HS.

As for having announcements to go only at certain time of day, the only solution solution I see is to duplicate events for different time of days.
One thing that I could add easily in a future version, is an action to disable/enable TTS for a specific chromecast from an event, as you can do it from the config page. That would allow you to create event to disable TTS for a specific chromecast during a specific period of the day.

[dannieboiz]

Thanks Spud, I spent the last two days playing around with this. I added virtual switches and events to mute and unmute devices at certain time of days which has the same effect. Don't need it to tell me my camera sensor is triggered at 3am. Seems to be working.

I did find that selecting individual devices in the plugin causes delay between one another. I ended up selecting the TTS to be enabled on the Whole house group instead. Wouldn't know it's stability yet but so far seems to do ok.

[cowinger]

If you create an event that has speech you can click on the "edit client speaker list" in the THEN statement. You must add it to the window spelled exactly. see pics.






You can then pick which chromecast you want the speech to go to. All or just one by adding them all to the window, see last pic, and add as you need from the THEN statement

[dannieboiz]

Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't have advance option enabled. Enabled it gave me this option. Definitely a door opener here thanks again

Update: I just look at this... I believe this is for HS speaker client but not Chromecast speakers

[spud]

Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't have advance option enabled. Enabled it gave me this option. Definitely a door opener here thanks again

Update: I just look at this... I believe this is for HS speaker client but not Chromecast speakers

It works for Chromecast speakers, but you have to manually enter the name of speaker in the textbox

[dannieboiz]

I have way too many gH and GHM in the house to be entering them manually per speak event. I'll stick with the grouping in Google Assistant app until there's a problem. So far today it's skipping along.