Setting timers works well though
I guess my age is showing, but isn't it just a mono speaker? so much is lost in music without stereo imaging. it's one of the main eyebrow raising things to me about most bluetooth portable speakers. If you're mainly listening to podcasts or playing lullabyes to a kids room, sure, but we're adults here and personally I like listening to stereo way to much for these to be an option.
This is Siri’s primary use case, at least I assume so based on my experience.
As long as the timer isn’t for 50 minutes.
I'd love to know the % of Alexa Dots (whatever the small ones are called now) that are used for anything more than this.
Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but I don't see anything else I would want it to do.
To respond is similarly cumbersome and soon you give up completely. I can only assume it was designed by someone whose parents were killed in an intercom-related disaster and has sworn revenge.
I bought a mini for my office with this purpose in mind, but it has been a total waste.
To be honest, I'm honestly sick of Google Home's approach to this since the Gemini update has turned everything really slow and I'm getting close to the point where I'd rather home-roll a full system myself that works reliably instead of the crapshoot that this is. Home Assistant seems to have a functionality bridge to Google Home connected devices like my blinds or cameras so I should be able to retain the edge devices but I have half a mind to just dump the whole thing and start over.
The first step is getting speakers in a room: there are tons of products that do this, apple, google, Sonos.
Most of them have the audio quality of a bag of instruments.
There are tons of class D amps that you can hook up to speakers: Wiim, acrylic and so on... this will run you anywhere from 100 bucks to 500 and thats before you buy the speakers. Most of these will be great for playing music and projecting your voice.
The moment you involve a TV... well things get ugly because your going to want arc for HDMI and your going to want a center channel cause with out it your likely in subtitle hell half the time. This will get expensive a Sonos sound bar is a few hundred and if you want something better well... Let's say you can get to the point of making a GPU look affordable real quick.
Now that you can play audio, how do you hear it... well your phone works and there are tons of satellites out there.
You're now going to need to run home assistant to "interrupt" what ever is playing (if something is) to play your message and then return what ever it was to its current state.
After trying out WIIM, Acrylic, some high end stereo gear I just settled on half assed audio quality and bought more Sonos gear. I kept a single WIIM unit, cheap amp, decent speakers and a sub around for when I want to really listen to music but other than that I tolerate sonos' middling quality for day to day use (and I am, by no means an audiophile).
Because of 2 reasons
1) this is very antisocial behavior.
2) so many people have a mobile phone at arm's reach a majority of the time so there you have your intercom.
Well educated members of an household would know when dinner is ready because they would actually help make it ready for everyone. Occasionally one teenager could legitimately focus on homework but it is not actually a bad thing that someone has to move its ass and walk upstairs to knock at their door and tell them. We call that free exercise, much cheaper than a fitness subscription.
When I hear about home assistant and domotic in general, the only image that comes to me is those scenes in Wall-E where people live in a flying armchair with a holo screen in front of their face 24/7, their only interaction with a physical world being to only move their arms once in a while to grab a soda.
When I was a kid I remember a house we rented for a while came with intercom using the electrical lines. Past the initial novelty, they mostly collected dust and ended up being unplugged.
I’m genuinely confused why you would think that.
> Well educated members of an household would know when dinner is ready because they would actually help make it ready for everyone.
This is one of the most obnoxious things I have read all year.
And then people will complain that children these days spend their time in front of a screen...
I think @prmoustache is also referring to manners in general.
A) scramble around the entire house going "dinner in 5 minutes"
B) yell the same, hope people hear it, and negatively affect your mood
C) have some sort of system that lets everyone know with the tap of a button.
Additionally, cooking in group is a great moment to have a conversation, much more than the actual dinner where everybody is chewing.
And the delegation approach defeats the entire purpose of the fore-warning, which is to allow people to wrap up whatever they were doing, out of respect for their time.
There is a limit where having more people won't really help but if one needs to peel some vegetables, press garlic, cut other vegetables, prep and season some meat, clean necessary hardwares and surfaces, one person will never be faster alone with only 2 hands available.
Besides it is not only a fun group activity but a good teaching moment as well for kids / teenagers, especially if you want them to develop healthy and cost effective habits instead relying on buying preprocessed food most of their life.
> out of respect for their time.
What kind of castle do your typical family live that it takes hours to reach to other people? We are talking seconds literally even if you have to reach someone in the barn at the extreme end of a typical garden. I am not talking about the royalty here.
The trope is mom tells the kid to tell dad dinner's ready, and kid just yells really loud to dad, while mom looks on with exasperation. Or was that just my childhood?
I guess so, I wouldn't have done that as a kid, nor do my own kids do that or they would quickly lose privileges.