How to Add a Smart Speaker to Your Home Assistant Setup

Home Assistant is super versatile but not all smart devices work with the open-source smart home platform. I’ve spent the past few weeks trying Amazon, Google, and Apple smart speakers with Home Assistant, and it didn’t go quite as I’d hoped.

Not All Speakers Pair Easily

The first step to using speakers with your Home Assistant smart home is to add them. This didn’t go at all how I thought it would. Before starting, if I had to guess on the complexity of adding speakers, I would have imagined Google would be easiest, Alexa next, and Apple last. But, that’s not the case at all.

Google and Apple speakers both work natively within Home Assistant. Yes, you read that right. My HomePod Mini and my Google Nest speakers were both available to utilize within Home Assistant without having to add any extra plugins, repositories, or anything.

To set up your Google or Apple speaker, you’ll want to start by navigating to Settings and then Devices & Services.

Once inside the Devices & Services tab, any Google or Apple speakers that are on the same network as your Home Assistant installation should automatically come up under the “Discovered” section at the top of the screen.

If they don’t, then you can simply click the “Add Integration” button at the bottom left of the page. Once you click that button, you’re looking for either the Google Cast or Apple TV integration. For some reason, HomePod devices are listed under Apple TV in Home Assistant.

If you’re manually adding the device, you might need to enter the name or IP of that smart speaker. However, you shouldn’t need to manually do it, it should just show up under the “Discovered” area of Home Assistant. I purposefully removed my HomePod mini from Home Assistant to re-add it and it automatically came back under Discovered, so I could add it in a few simple clicks.

Amazon’s Alexa speakers are another story, however. While Amazon has a native integration with Home Assistant, Echo speakers are not part of this package. For that, you need the Alexa Media Player plugin inside of Home Assistant, which is a headache and a half to get set up.

I’m not going to walk through all the steps to configuring the Alexa Media Player add-on for Home Assistant for a few reasons. Firstly, I’m not sure how secure it is. You have to add the plugin as a 2FA app to your Amazon account, and then it generates an Amazon login page where you have to put your email, password, and the 2FA code it generates. Second (and this is a big one), I couldn’t get it to work.

I spent hours trying to get Alexa Media Player to play audio on my Echo, and it just refused to work. This is partially to be expected, as even the GitHub page says, “Please note this mimics the Alexa app but Amazon may cut off access at anytime.” I’m not sure if Amazon has cut off access, or I just couldn’t get it to work. But, take my wasted time here for your benefit and just forget about trying to use Alexa speakers with Home Assistant—at least for now.

There are some out there that have been able to configure Alexa Media Player to work with Home Assistant, but I couldn’t find much in the way of recent success. And, even with my own years of smart home automation experience, programming experience, and general computer knowledge, I just couldn’t get it to work.

I could pair my Echo speakers, but I couldn’t actually get media playback to work. The speaker would just come on and say something along the lines of “Direct media playback is not supported” and then turn back off.

So, in summary: use HomeKit or Google Assistant speakers with Home Assistant, and leave Amazon Echo by the wayside for a smooth experience.

Using Google and Apple Speakers With Home Assistant

Once your various speakers are set up within Home Assistant, they all essentially function the same. You can play media on the speakers and even use them for announcements throughout the house.

I leveraged Music Assistant to play Apple Music on my HomePod and Google Nest Mini. Even though both devices natively support Apple Music, it was more of a proof of concept to see how the services worked. Music Assistant supports a wide range of other players, including Spotify, Soundcloud, Qobuz, Plex, Jellyfin, Deezer, and more.

So, this could be a great way to utilize your speakers in new ways. Especially for a HomePod, which typically requires an iPhone to start playback on anything but a handful of music providers. So, if you want to use a Windows computer to start music playback from Spotify on your HomePod, Home Assistant can help you with that.

With that out of the way, let’s get back to playing audio on Nest and HomePod speakers. I would simply dive into Music Assistant, select the respective speaker, and tell it to play audio. And, every time it worked flawlessly. My Echo, however, refused to play any source of media for me from Home Assistant.

Can You Use Different Brands of Smart Speakers Together?

Sadly, as I expected, Home Assistant didn’t really allow me to take speakers from different brands and turn them into a true whole home audio system. Though, it did kinda work. Let me explain.

With Music Assistant and Home Assistant, I was able to play audio to both my HomePod mini and my Nest Hub simultaneously. However, there was a slight delay between the two. When at a lower volume, this actually wasn’t that noticeable.

You see, my HomePod mini is in my master bedroom and the Nest Hub is in the kitchen, which are at opposite ends of the house from each other. So, when I had Music Assistant playing audio on the HomePod mini and Nest Hub at a lower volume level, the delay was unnoticeable.

I could enjoy the music in the master bedroom and then when I left there and walked toward the kitchen, the HomePod mini faded out and the Nest Hub faded in. Because of this, I couldn’t tell there was a delay in the speakers.

Once I turned the volume up to a point where I could hear the HomePod mini from the kitchen, there was a noticeable delay of about a second. Maybe half a second? Either way, it was enough to irritate me as I was listening, so I turned the speakers back down to only hear one at a time.

“Who would want to hear a speaker across the house?” you may ask. Well, probably no one. But, if I had a speaker in the living room or den, which are both next to the kitchen, then I would hear that speaker regardless of the volume. So, unless it’s properly synced, as these speakers typically do when you’re using a first-party service, I wouldn’t try to use Home Assistant for whole-home audio.

However, if you want to use Home Assistant to issue broadcasts all throughout your home on various speakers, it’s great for that! Home Assistant has a built-in text-to-speech (TTS) engine, so you can have it announce anything you’d like on any speaker. There are ways to group speakers, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to get the native TTS implementation to broadcast to all speakers.

If you already have scenes built into your Home Assistant setup that trigger TTS upon someone arriving home, leaving, a door opening/closing, or other similar situations, then the TTS engine can talk to all the speakers in your home that are configured through Home Assistant.

Want to take a deeper dive into what Home Assistant is and why it’s so popular? Check out our other coverage that breaks it all down, from getting started with Home Assistant to showcasing why local control of your devices is better than letting the cloud handle it all.