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Comment by mixermachine | Hacker News Reader

We mostly use Alexa for playing music (Radio & Spotify) and setting timers. We also use the multi-room music feature where Alexa plays the same audio source on a certain group (great for parties).

Does Home Assistant also have these features?

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Timers works fine.

Music - yes, albeit a bit finicky to set up.

There's an addon called Music Assistant that controls the music, you can connect it to your provider of choice (local files, Spotify, etc), and you can let it connect to several types of sinks.

OOB the HA only knows a few commands (pause, next, etc) but there are some community driven effort to improve the support, such as "Play the album Dark side of the moon". [0].

[0] https://github.com/music-assistant/voice-support

Thanks, good info. I read nothing about the multi-room-music-feature. Do you by chance know if it can be done?

Given the lawsuits against Google from Sonos in the last 5 years, it doesn't seem to be low hanging fruit. Might not exist yet.

Yes, there is functionality to create groups in music assistant. You can even create groups between different types of sinks (so you can combine say Chromecasts together with home assistants media player together with airplay). However, I have not played around with that too much so I don’t know how well the players will sync with each other.

I can’t see any reason why you couldn’t do that. I’ve only been using Home Assistant for a few months, but off the top of my head I reckon I could do that with an automation. The catch is that you may have to set that automation up yourself (either in the UI Or with YAML), and it's less user friendly than an alexa is out of the box. But if you're happy to tinker, as most folks on here are, then the world is your oyster..

This blog post is a great illustration of what I mean: https://blog.jlpouffier.fr/chatgpt-powered-music-search-engi...

It has some of those features. I think I’d attach speakers to the HA Voice you can use them that way but the built-in speaker will not cut it (think gen1 Echo).

They are cool little devices, but they have a while to go before they can replace the Alexa’s.

Ah ok, thanks for the info. Had hoped I could jump on HA Voice right away because I have already a small HA server in my home.

Same here, I was ready to replace 8-10 echo with them in a heartbeat if it was even close to the Echo but it's not quite there yet. I hope v2 is good enough as I'd love to remove the echo's but they are too convenient currently.

Are those features worth having a wiretap in your entire home?

No that is why I'm asking. I want a replacement.

Without those features I can just replace Alexa with nothing because we do not use any other features.

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