Feature: Publish as a media_player (device class speaker)

[DeftNerd]

I find myself using the TTS HASS feature (a nice one is available if you use the premium cloud service) to have text, often notifications, turned into audio that's sent to media players.

It would be stellar if the HASS.Agent could publish itself as a media player (in the "speaker" device class) so Home Assistant could send audio streams to the agent for playback using the Windows audio subsystem, as well as do a few other things available to "speaker" devices such as unmuting and controlling the volume.

This might be better suited for the HASS.Agent-Notifier repository as it would likely be used more as a notification option, but I could also see people wanting to use it to play music or something. Perhaps this could be spun off as another additional service like HASS.Agent-MediaPlayer

Similar ways to accomplish this:

• A similar project is at https://github.com/pcwii/HApyAudio but it has VLC as a requirement.
• One can add the VLC telnet integration in HomeAssistant to communicate with VLC directly using telnet. Presumably, VLC has to be set up as a windows service.
• Another integration is VLC without telnet (HTTP?). Not sure if this is better or worse than the telnet method.
• One can set up Music Player Daemon. Haven't tried this yet, but it seems more oriented towards linux and doesn't integrate into windows that well.
• Can have Clementine Media Player running on the computers. While I know it can be minimized to the system tray on close, I don't think it can be set to start without the GUI and just in the system tray.
• AirServer acts as a GoogleCast/Aircast/Miracast receiver on any windows computer, but it costs money and isn't FOSS.
• Very promising, a .NET SnapCast Client application that's meant to run on startup.

Something that uses native Windows features would be preferred and would be one less thing to install.

[LAB02-Admin]

Hi @DeftNerd, thanks for the (extensive) feature request. That does sound like a good idea, I currently use a pi for this purpose but one less device would be better.

I'll put it on the list :)

hassagent-2

[Growiel]

Hello,

Just a quick post to say that I think this is the only missing feature and am glad you are taking on the request. I like text notifications but sometimes I'm focused on something else and miss them. Having them play as TTS as well would be neat.

[LAB02-Admin]

This has been added to the latest beta:

https://github.com/LAB02-Research/HASS.Agent/releases/tag/2022.12.0-beta1