One of the very first things that got me interested in Home Automation was having the ability to announce certain activity around the house (e.g. Front Door Opened). Years ago I had an Xfinity Security system that allowed for user selectable sound clips to be played when opening/closing sensors. Not only was this fun but it turned out to be quite practical...It's a great security feature to be aware if the downstairs back door opens when the kids are downstairs taking a nap. In our new house I've envisioned numerous different ways to benefit from announcements but so far I have been relatively unsuccessful at getting a reliable setup functioning seemingly no matter how much money I spend or what system I use.
So, the cool thing about this plugin and Indigo is that announcements actually seem to work...even TTS announcements! This is something that hasn't been the case with the various other HA setup I've worked with (Namely SmartThings and Vera for this functionality). I haven't tested extensively yet but setting this up on Indigo was impressively easy for both TTS and local sound clips but what has surprised me most is the amount of latency involved with playing a simple sound clip. This is to be expected with cloud based TTS but I had assumed that playing a simple .5 second local mp3 file (a chime tone) when a door opens would be relatively instantaneous. Wondering if there might be some type of trick to making this work quicker? Perhaps an uncompressed wav file or some other method because the latency seems to be pretty clearly associated with the delay between the trigger firing and the sound playing.
So to simplify... is there anyone out there using Sonos for contact sensor notifications (i.e. Door open/closed)? I'd love to hear more about your setup particularly in this area but also with any other announcement type functionality you use this plugin for. Thanks for any ideas!