HA Speaks

HA Speaks is a Home Assistant custom integration plus a Hubitat virtual speech driver. Hubitat sends a simple speech request to Home Assistant, and Home Assistant fans it out to configured speech groups such as Everywhere or Downstairs.

This first version focuses on Home Assistant media_player targets, including Google Cast devices, using Home Assistant's TTS service. It also includes an optional Alexa Media Player notification path for Echo announcements if that custom integration is installed in Home Assistant.

Home Assistant Install

1. Copy custom_components/ha_speaks into your Home Assistant custom_components directory.
2. Restart Home Assistant.
3. Go to Settings > Devices & services > Add integration and add HA Speaks.
4. Open Configure on the integration to add speech groups.

HACS Custom Repository Install

After this project is published to GitHub, add the repository to HACS as a custom repository with category Integration. HACS will install the custom_components/ha_speaks integration directory.

Each group can include Home Assistant media_player entities. For Google Home devices, use the entities created by the Google Cast integration.

Configured speech groups appear as HA Speaks sensor entities. The sensor state is the number of targets in the group, and the attributes list the media players and optional Alexa targets assigned to that group.

HA Speaks includes local Home Assistant brand assets in custom_components/ha_speaks/brand. If the integration page still shows icon not available after updating, restart Home Assistant and hard-refresh the browser so the frontend requests the new brand image.

For Amazon Echo devices, install the Alexa Media Player custom integration. Once it is configured, Echo devices should appear in Home Assistant as media_player entities. Add those devices to the group's Alexa media players field so HA Speaks uses notify.alexa_media announcements instead of Home Assistant TTS.

TTS Setup

The integration calls Home Assistant's modern tts.speak service by default. You need a TTS entity configured in Home Assistant, for example Home Assistant Cloud, Piper, or another TTS provider.

The default TTS entity is selected when adding the integration. You can change it later from the integration's Configure screen.

Service

Call:

service: ha_speaks.announce
data:
  message: "Message text goes here"
  group: "Everywhere"
  volume: 80

volume is a Hubitat-style 0-100 value and is mapped to Home Assistant's 0.0-1.0 media player volume scale.

You can also bypass groups:

service: ha_speaks.announce
data:
  message: "Dinner is ready"
  media_player_entity_ids:
    - media_player.kitchen_display
    - media_player.living_room_speaker

For explicit Echo targets:

service: ha_speaks.announce
data:
  message: "Dinner is ready"
  alexa_media_player_entity_ids:
    - media_player.kitchen_echo
  alexa_notification_type: tts
  volume: 60

Synchronization and Chimes

HA Speaks dispatches Google/Cast TTS targets and Alexa notification targets in parallel to reduce avoidable delay. True sample-accurate synchronization across individual Google speakers, Echo speakers, and mixed platforms is not something Home Assistant can guarantee because each platform buffers and starts playback independently.

For the best Google-only timing, create a native Google speaker group in the Google Home app and add that group media player to HA Speaks instead of adding each speaker individually. Native speaker groups are synchronized by Google before Home Assistant sends audio to them.

Alexa groups can use two notification modes:

• announce: Alexa announcement behavior, usually with the announcement chime.
• tts: plain Alexa TTS behavior, generally without the announcement chime.

Select the Alexa notification type when editing a HA Speaks group, or override it per service call with alexa_notification_type.

Hubitat Install

1. In Hubitat, go to Drivers Code.
2. Add the contents of hubitat/ha-speaks-speech-engine-driver.groovy.
3. Create a virtual device using the HA Speaks Speech Engine driver.
4. Set preferences:
   • Home Assistant base URL, such as http://homeassistant.local:8123
   • A Home Assistant long-lived access token
   • Default group, such as Everywhere
   • Default volume, such as 80

The Hubitat driver implements SpeechSynthesis.speak(message), plus speakToGroup(message, group, volume).

Echo Support Notes

Home Assistant does not include a native Echo speaker broadcast integration. The common path is the Alexa Media Player custom integration, which exposes notify.alexa_media. HA Speaks can call that service for configured Alexa targets, but this path depends on the service being available in your Home Assistant instance.