Voice Announce for HomeSeer: Getting Ready for Public Beta
Voice Announce is preparing for public beta with features that connect HomeSeer and your Echo devices in both directions. Make announcements, trigger events with spoken phrases, control music, respond to timers and send notifications that wait until you’re ready. The plugin now installs its companion service automatically, while a separate, limited Home Library preview adds Plex, Emby and Jellyfin playback.
Alexa announcements, room-aware voice events, music controls and notifications—with simpler setup.
What started as a way to make Alexa speak from HomeSeer has grown into something quite a bit broader.
I’m preparing Voice Announce for a public beta, with announcements, music controls, notifications and events that respond to what you say to Alexa. I’ve also been working on making setup easier, so trying it doesn’t turn into a project of its own.
There are still some rough edges. That’s part of why I’m opening it up to more testers: something that works well in my house needs a turn in yours.
HomeSeer talking back
The original idea was straightforward: let a HomeSeer event speak through the Echo devices already around the house.
A door left open, a finished washing machine, a water sensor detecting a leak—those are useful things to hear about without checking a screen.
Voice Announce can speak through one Echo, several selected speakers or all of them. You can include an announcement tone, use Amazon’s sound effects and Alexa’s built-in phrases, or add pauses, emphasis and whispering to your own messages.
Messages can also include HomeSeer device values. Rather than a fixed “garage door open” announcement, an event can tell you how long it has been open or read the current temperature.
Events that know where you spoke
One of the bigger additions is the optional ability to trigger HomeSeer events from phrases Alexa recognizes.
With Listen for what’s said to Alexa enabled, you can match a phrase, particular words or an exact request. You can also exclude words to avoid triggering an event when you don’t mean to.
The event knows which Echo heard the request. That means a reply can come from the speaker you’re near, and an action can use the room assigned to that Echo in HomeSeer.
For example, “lights please” can control lights in whichever room heard it, using a single event. A spoken number can become a device setting too: “set the pool to eighty four” can pass that number to a HomeSeer device, within limits you choose.
The inspiration for this part came from Jon00’s Echo Skill Helper.
There is a caveat: Alexa still processes the request herself. For custom phrases, an Alexa routine that simply responds “Okay” can prevent her from giving an unrelated answer while HomeSeer carries out the action.
Listening is off by default. When enabled, it reads recognized requests from your Amazon voice history to match your event rules. The plugin and companion service do not log or save those request words to disk.
Music and everyday Alexa controls
Voice Announce now does more around the speakers, too.
HomeSeer events can start music from services linked to your Amazon account, including Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn and iHeartRadio. You can choose an Echo or an Alexa speaker group, then control playback, skip tracks, change volume, shuffle, repeat or stop.
Each Echo has Now Playing status in HomeSeer, along with playback controls.
You can also run Alexa routines, request her weather forecast or calendar information, set reminders, manage Shopping and To-do list items, and control Do Not Disturb.
An event can even ask Alexa a question and place her reply in a Last Answer feature for another event to use.
Timers and alarms become part of the house
Alexa knows when the kitchen timer finishes. HomeSeer knows how to get your attention elsewhere.
Voice Announce connects those two things. A timer, alarm or reminder going off can trigger a HomeSeer event—so the kitchen timer can be announced in the workshop, for example.
There’s also a trigger for an alarm, timer or reminder coming up. That opens up possibilities such as gradually bringing up the lights before a morning alarm or giving an early warning before a timer ends.
Other additions include showing the next scheduled alert and canceling the next alarm, timer or reminder of a selected kind. For repeating alerts, the cancellation skips the next occurrence while keeping the later schedule.
A message that waits until you get home
A useful suggestion from the HomeSeer forum was that spoken announcements don’t help much when nobody is home.
The beta therefore includes two other ways to deliver a message:
- A notification through the Alexa phone app, for reaching you away from the speakers.
- An Alexa notification with the yellow ring and alert sound, waiting until you ask, “Alexa, what are my notifications?”
For yellow-ring notifications, the initial implementation uses the free Notify Me by Thomptronics skill and its access code.
I’m continuing to investigate a native approach. It may still need a companion Alexa skill, and I’m exploring whether that could share a skill with the Home Library functionality. That’s work in progress, rather than a promise about how the final version will work.
Your own music library
Alongside the plugin, I’ve been developing Home Library, a companion Alexa skill for playing music from your own Plex, Emby or Jellyfin server.
It supports requests for artists, albums, genres, songs and playlists. You can specify the library in the request or use the one last selected.
Home Library is not publicly available yet. I can invite a limited number of testers to its separate preview. It isn’t required for announcements, voice-triggered events or playback from commercial music services linked to your Alexa account.
Less setup to do by hand
Voice Announce uses a small local companion service to maintain the Amazon connection.
Earlier preparation involved more manual work. The plugin now downloads, installs and starts that service automatically on first run, with progress and retry options on the Setup page.
You still need to complete a browser-based Amazon sign-in. After that, the service normally renews the session automatically. If Amazon requires another sign-in, the plugin tells you.
The service runs locally, but Alexa features still depend on Amazon’s online services. Yellow-ring notifications also pass through Notify Me when you enable that option.
What I’m looking for from the beta
The beta supports Windows, with Linux and Amazon accounts outside the United States newly supported. Those are areas where reports from other setups will be especially helpful.
I’d like feedback on installation, sign-in, speaker discovery and everyday use. Clear instructions matter as much as a working feature, so please tell me where you get stuck or where an explanation leaves you guessing.
A quick “it installed and worked” is useful, too!
The beta guide covers setup, a first announcement, optional features and how to send a Support report. I’ll share the package and instructions when the public beta is ready.
If you’d like to test Home Library as well, email plugins@cyberlogix.net and let me know whether you use Plex, Emby or Jellyfin.
Alexa is the first platform supported. I also plan to explore Sonos and Google devices, with features depending on what each platform allows.
For now, I’m looking forward to seeing what people build with their Echo devices and HomeSeer—and finding the rough edges together.