topic Re: Playing sound effects from automation scrips in Smart Home Developer Forum

Playing sound effects from automation scrips

Mayilong — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 14:10:52 GMT

Hi,

I think it would be very useful to be able to play sound effects on speakers in the home from automation scripts.

E.g playing a doorbell sound or a dog barking when a person enter the front yard based on a camera event.

It is not is not possible according to Nest support that I called today.

It appears that Google provides as lousy support these days as everyone else.

I recall years ago, calling Google support and was actual connected to a real engineer that fixed the problem straight away. Nowadays, the support is outsourced to some call center that can only look up predefined answers in a database.

Of course it could be a business decision to not support playing custom sounds as Google sell music services. But, hey, I am not after playing musing, just sound effects. They could limit the sound play time to 30 seconds e.g to get around that problem.

I have spend a lot of money on Google hardware and I also pay monthly services for storage, music and more. For all that I would expect better support.

I guess the solution is to buy a connected speaker from another brand.
Or maybe even switch out the whole automation solution?

Re: Playing sound effects from automation scrips

sipriyadarshi — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 17:22:59 GMT

Hello @Mayilong ,

Thank you for reaching out to us with your issue and sorry for all the inconvenience caused. We do support the capability to play sound effects on the speakers in home from automation script. You can make use of the OkGoogle command for playing the sound effect what you want to play for your automation. As reference attaching a small snippet for the same, with the Dog Sound as mentioned in your question above.

Re: Playing sound effects from automation scrips

Mayilong — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 08:02:58 GMT

Thanks for the effort @sipriyadarshi !

I have two problem with this solution:

1) It does not simply play the sound effect. It also announce the sound. E.g. if I use "Play Doorbell Sound", the result is "This is a doorbell <sound>". This makes the feature ultimate USELESS.

2) I cannot specify the exact sound. I guess the sound can be different every time depending on Google assistant mood.

Maybe I should try to get an Alexa, do you know if I can control Alexa from Google Home scripts?

Cheers /Mats

Re: Playing sound effects from automation scrips

Mayilong — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 15:41:01 GMT

I completely abandoned Google Automation now. I am using home assistant and it is much more capable in terms of programming features and robust as it is mostly running local. And playing sound from Home Assistant in Google Home speakers works flawlessly. I use Google Home cameras and Google Home speakers and they are largely compatible with Home Assistant. When the Google equipment are worn out, I may look for non-Google solutions. Google have seen better days when it comes to support, now the consumers are basically on their own even though they pay for service.