Sonos Announcement Latency

Posted on
Fri May 05, 2017 5:59 pm
mssearch offline
Posts: 18
Joined: Mar 27, 2016

Sonos Announcement Latency

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!

Posted on
Tue May 09, 2017 1:17 am
elov offline
Posts: 20
Joined: Dec 27, 2016

Re: Sonos Announcement Latency

Have you tried it out with Google TTS and what latency are you getting?
I've used it as my alarm system entry/disarm notification sounds and I may get a latency of 2 seconds from once I open my front door until the Sonos announces "Alarm system active, please enter your security PIN to disarm", followed by a new announcement "You have 15 seconds left".

Posted on
Tue May 09, 2017 12:56 pm
mssearch offline
Posts: 18
Joined: Mar 27, 2016

Re: Sonos Announcement Latency

Thanks for your comment @elov.

I have tried Google TTS and am really impressive with how remarkably fast it is for a cloud based service. It's right on par with playing a local sound file actually...

For some reason I had assumed that if I played prerecorded sound clips (local files) that the response would be nearly instant.

The latency isn't an issue for any type of larger announcement but I'd like to get as close to real time as possible for my "chime" sounds. Frankly, this may just not be possible though I'd like to get some solid confirmation that it isn't before I completely give up.

Thanks for the ideas on how you use your announcements as well... Love thinking about all of the cool ways to utilize this feature.

Posted on
Wed Oct 10, 2018 9:34 am
neetorama offline
Posts: 24
Joined: Feb 23, 2016

Re: Sonos Announcement Latency

@mssearch

Did you ever get this resolved? I have a similar setup to yours -- playing a locally stored MP3 when the contact sensor on my front door is tripped. Would love to eliminate or minimize the delay as much as possible.

Posted on
Thu Oct 11, 2018 3:04 am
agame offline
Posts: 514
Joined: Jul 13, 2017
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Re: Sonos Announcement Latency

I'm really interested in this also, in spite of several attempts over a couple of years even local announcements have always been remarkably unpredictable, unless all devices are active when the event occurs (which often isn't the case).

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