That is some good thinking. I have some non-wyze devices I might have to see what Alexa can help do with routines now.
This is true that it is way too complicated for most people, I should point out that rooting a phone is totally unnecessary though. I don’t have any devices rooted and use it just fine.
Still, to prove your point of how hard it was to set up (I spent several hours trying to figure it all out on my own) Here’s the tasker setup to have my Google Assistants (@AdonistheGreat I have the following working: Google Home/Google Home mini, Nest home, nest home mini, Nest Hub, Google Hub, etc) announce things I want:
- First install/setup Tasker and the Autocast plugin, Best to have some pre-recorded audios ready…I’ve used text2speech.org and ttsmp3.com to create my own text to speech MP3’s for free, but you can do whatever you want casted. Autocast also apparently does it’s own TTS, but I haven’t tried it.
- In Tasker add new profile (plus sign)
- Select Event
- Select UI
- Select Notification
- Click Owner Application and select Wyze or WyzeBeta then the back arrow
- Select “Text” and type in something specific to the notification you want watched, when done, hit the back arrow.
a) For example, if you have a sensor called “Mailbox” and you want it to watch for any notifications that have the word mailbox in them, you enter “Mailbox” surrounded in asterisks, but without the quotes.
b) If you want a very specific kind of notification, you can enter exactly what the text will say, such as “Mailbox was opened*” or “Person Detected on Front Cam*” or whatever, but use an asterisk at the end since the date/time at the end of each notification will always be different for these Wyze notifications. - Select New Task
- Click +
- Select Plugin
- Select AutoCast, then AutoCast again in the popup
- Select configuration
- Select Cast Device and choose which device to cast to
a) If you haven’t already set up Autocast to detect your speakers, load it up, make sure you’re on the same network, click plus, and select each one individually to add them to the list of available devices, and then repeat step 10/11/12 and you’ll now see the devices) - Select Screen and choose Full Screen Media
- Select Full Screen Media elements
- Select Audio
- Select Audio - song to play
- Enter the location of the mp3 you want played when the event occurs (if you already know the exact location of the mp3 on your device you can just paste the location in there, otherwise when it asks if you need help selecting a file, choose “Yes” and browse for it)
- Select okay
- Click back
- Click back
- Click the checkmark
- Click back
- Click back
- Click the checkmark
Finally all set.
It was a big pain to figure out all on my own without a walkthrough, but I love it now!
I can also set up an extra event in the profile so that it only makes announcements on certain speakers during certain hours of the day (ie: if I come home from a meeting late at night, it’s not making announcements on the Google Home Minis in people’s bedrooms while they’re sleeping).
Once you’ve done it once you can always save the event or action and clone it to other profiles, or make small modifications like change which device it is casting to. So, since I wanted it to cast the same thing to several devices I copied the action for 1 device, then just added a duplicate action and just changed which device was in that action so the next Google would also broadcast the message. Then I didn’t have to repeat all the steps. It was the same profile with the same event, it just sent another action to another device at the same time.
Anyway, that’s a walkthrough for anyone who wants to get their Google speakers to announce things, but @kjay is right that it is WAY too complicated for most people to figure out, especially on their own, but even with a long complex walkthrough. I tried tons of different methods, and finally settled on this one as the best as far as I could find so far. Hopefully it helps someone else who’s been frustrated like I was trying to figure it out for myself.
***Note that it’s best to set this up on a dedicated android device that stays at home and connected to the same local network the Google devices are on. If you set it up on your phone, then it will only work as long as you are there and connected to the network, but if you go to work or something and other people are home, it won’t announce because your device isn’t present. So use an old phone or a tablet that’s always connected to your network and it will always work. If you don’t care because you only want it to work when you’re home anyway, then go ahead and do it on your primary phone. It is pretty cool. You can make it work with ANY notifications, set certain hours or when something opens or closes or anything. I love it.