Capabilities of Alexa

[rf9000]

All,

In a new build, I will have 12-14 in ceiling concealed Echo Dot 3 devices. I would really like them to perform the simplest of functions, but I have been told in the past this is not doable. I would simply like to be able to sit in my kitchen for example, and say “Alexa, play Maroon 5”, whereas Alexa would notify the C4 system, kitchen zone turns on, and Maroon 5 plays. I want to listen to music on the whole home audio, not the tiny little Dot speakers. This seems to me like the most basic function that one could want. A simple integration of Alexa into C4, but I have been told it really can’t be done? I mean isnt this why we spend the huge amounts of money on C4? There are other solutions out now or coming out that can easily do this, but the super expensive C4 system can’t perform this simple function?

[eggzlot]

24 minutes ago, rf9000 said:

All,

In a new build, I will have 12-14 in ceiling concealed Echo Dot 3 devices. I would really like them to perform the simplest of functions, but I have been told in the past this is not doable. I would simply like to be able to sit in my kitchen for example, and say “Alexa, play Maroon 5”, whereas Alexa would notify the C4 system, kitchen zone turns on, and Maroon 5 plays. I want to listen to music on the whole home audio, not the tiny little Dot speakers. This seems to me like the most basic function that one could want. A simple integration of Alexa into C4, but I have been told it really can’t be done? I mean isnt this why we spend the huge amounts of money on C4? There are other solutions out now or coming out that can easily do this, but the super expensive C4 system can’t perform this simple function?

What system on the market can use Alexa Dot’s to play music on another system’s multi channel amps in specific rooms?  Just curious.

I’d also be careful on how you mount / install those Dots.  Amazon has changed sizes/shapes of different generation models.  In a few years when it comes to upgrading that could be a lot of patch work in your ceilings.  Not talking you out of it but you seem to have a very large install given your other post - have you looked at Josh.Ai ?  May suit your needs better.

[wnpublic]

This plan would earn approximately 0/10 points with my wife, but who am I to judge another man’s dream house.  To address the cost, obsolescence, and power budget issues, have you considered just running microphones from all the spots back to a single source?that way you would not be installing the 2021 equivalent of a CD player at multiple parts of your ceiling. 

[zaphod]

Depending on how everything is wired and configured, and assuming enough Echo Dots you should be able to do what you want using triggers.  The complexity is that you generally need two commands as you are controlling two systems - (1) Alexa for music playback, and (2) Control4 for turning on amps/music zones. You can get around that with triggers as Control4 does stuff automatically when it senses audio on a zone.  But that has drawbacks too as other Alexa tasks may trip the trigger and interrupt other types of audio. You also may have to tell Alexa where to play the music "Alexa, play Maroon 5 in the kitchen". 

When you tell Alexa to play music to you always want it to play in every zone in your house?  Or just the room where the command was issued?  Or a combination of various rooms? If it is not always the same then you need to issue a second command to control zones/rooms.

This will also depend on how many different streams you may want from Alexa.  In an ideal world you may need two Echo devices for each room - one to act as a microphone and another at your amp to to act as an audio source.  But they are so cheap as to be a rounding error compared to stuff like 16 zones worth of amps. And you could like use Echo Flex devices as microphones.

To be honest, I prefer using the Spotify app to start music and then if I need it in more than one zone I will manually use C4 to turn on other zones as I rarely want the same combination of rooms.

[rf9000]

2 hours ago, eggzlot said:

What system on the market can use Alexa Dot’s to play music on another system’s multi channel amps in specific rooms?  Just curious.

I’d also be careful on how you mount / install those Dots.  Amazon has changed sizes/shapes of different generation models.  In a few years when it comes to upgrading that could be a lot of patch work in your ceilings.  Not talking you out of it but you seem to have a very large install given your other post - have you looked at Josh.Ai ?  May suit your needs better.

We actually custom made the mounts. They are a fake dummy 6.5” speaker, with a mount hidden inside so plenty of flexibility to swap them out. We have two CAT6A wires to each, one for power and one for any communication

[eggzlot]

29 minutes ago, rf9000 said:

We actually custom made the mounts. They are a fake dummy 6.5” speaker, with a mount hidden inside so plenty of flexibility to swap them out. We have two CAT6A wires to each, one for power and one for any communication

It’s a lot of effort and design for a $20 limited appliance.  Just my two cents

and you didn’t list what system can currently do there as you mentioned in the original post.  I’m curious because it’s not as easy as you try to make it appear to be

[rf9000]

1 hour ago, zaphod said:

Depending on how everything is wired and configured, and assuming enough Echo Dots you should be able to do what you want using triggers.  The complexity is that you generally need two commands as you are controlling two systems - (1) Alexa for music playback, and (2) Control4 for turning on amps/music zones. You can get around that with triggers as Control4 does stuff automatically when it senses audio on a zone.  But that has drawbacks too as other Alexa tasks may trip the trigger and interrupt other types of audio. You also may have to tell Alexa where to play the music "Alexa, play Maroon 5 in the kitchen". 

When you tell Alexa to play music to you always want it to play in every zone in your house?  Or just the room where the command was issued?  Or a combination of various rooms? If it is not always the same then you need to issue a second command to control zones/rooms.

This will also depend on how many different streams you may want from Alexa.  In an ideal world you may need two Echo devices for each room - one to act as a microphone and another at your amp to to act as an audio source.  But they are so cheap as to be a rounding error compared to stuff like 16 zones worth of amps. And you could like use Echo Flex devices as microphones.

To be honest, I prefer using the Spotify app to start music and then if I need it in more than one zone I will manually use C4 to turn on other zones as I rarely want the same combination of rooms.

 

30 minutes ago, eggzlot said:

It’s a lot of effort and design for a $20 limited appliance.  Just my two cents

and you didn’t list what system can currently do there as you mentioned in the original post.  I’m curious because it’s not as easy as you try to make it appear to be

I’m saying there are many systems that can be activated by Alexa and play music seamlessly. I just wanted to incorporate Alexa into C4 with the one function that I think I would use the most. Voice activated control on the whole home audio 

[rf9000]

2 hours ago, wnpublic said:

This plan would earn approximately 0/10 points with my wife, but who am I to judge another man’s dream house.  To address the cost, obsolescence, and power budget issues, have you considered just running microphones from all the spots back to a single source?that way you would not be installing the 2021 equivalent of a CD player at multiple parts of your ceiling. 

What do you mean by this? I could use the Echo Dots as microphones? How would this work?

[msgreenf]

23 minutes ago, rf9000 said:

 

I’m saying there are many systems that can be activated by Alexa and play music seamlessly. I just wanted to incorporate Alexa into C4 with the one function that I think I would use the most. Voice activated control on the whole home audio 

There is just no simple way to do this w control4 today...

[zaphod]

22 minutes ago, msgreenf said:

There is just no simple way to do this w control4 today...

Is there with any other systems? 

[msgreenf]

Just now, zaphod said:

Is there with any other systems? 

I believe with Sonos and heos it is because they can be set as the default speaker for a room 

[wnpublic]

Yeah was just gonna say Sonos. That would not require C4 at all though.

[zaphod]

Can't you do that with C4 and an audio sensing trigger for a single zone?

[msgreenf]

26 minutes ago, msgreenf said:

 

No. What you can do with c4 is nowhere near as fluid. 

[msgreenf]

And I stand corrected it's just sonos. Not even heos. 

[bdo21]

My family had become so used to using Alexa to play music before we installed C4, I needed some solution to get acceptance of the system. I ended up with echo dots in rooms and echo flexes in the rack. Each dot is paired with a flex as the default speaker so when the family ask Alexa to play a song (just as they normally would with Alexa - no extra words), it plays through the flex. The triad amp senses the audio and switches to that input.

It is not perfect - it doesn’t work for all alexa’s functionality (eg Alexa timers don’t seem to play anywhere) and the first 0.5 second or so of audio is lost when switching sources to the Alexa and obviously Control4 just shows the echo as the source without any more information such as song title, etc. But better than not being able to play music with Alexa through the in-ceiling speakers for me.

[rf9000]

3 hours ago, bdo21 said:

My family had become so used to using Alexa to play music before we installed C4, I needed some solution to get acceptance of the system. I ended up with echo dots in rooms and echo flexes in the rack. Each dot is paired with a flex as the default speaker so when the family ask Alexa to play a song (just as they normally would with Alexa - no extra words), it plays through the flex. The triad amp senses the audio and switches to that input.

It is not perfect - it doesn’t work for all alexa’s functionality (eg Alexa timers don’t seem to play anywhere) and the first 0.5 second or so of audio is lost when switching sources to the Alexa and obviously Control4 just shows the echo as the source without any more information such as song title, etc. But better than not being able to play music with Alexa through the in-ceiling speakers for me.

I also looked into JoshAI. It’s just crazy to me the amount of money that has to be spent to achieve this simple task within Control4. I mean, isn’t C4 this big giant now in automation, but we still have to invest in something like JoshAI to achieve very basic voice control over music? What are the C4 company developers and programmers doing all day? Haha. One would think that it’s even a bit embarrassing  having to buy third party hardware and software to get this to work. I don’t care about asking Alexa for cooking information or what the capital city is of Arizona, I just want voice control over music on the whole home audio. I also have 10 touchscreens all strategically placed. If the mic on the T3 would be able to pick up commends and process them for music, that would be awesome!

[eggzlot]

1 hour ago, rf9000 said:

I also looked into JoshAI. It’s just crazy to me the amount of money that has to be spent to achieve this simple task within Control4. I mean, isn’t C4 this big giant now in automation, but we still have to invest in something like JoshAI to achieve very basic voice control over music? What are the C4 company developers and programmers doing all day? Haha. One would think that it’s even a bit embarrassing  having to buy third party hardware and software to get this to work. I don’t care about asking Alexa for cooking information or what the capital city is of Arizona, I just want voice control over music on the whole home audio. I also have 10 touchscreens all strategically placed. If the mic on the T3 would be able to pick up commends and process them for music, that would be awesome!

Crestron is the giant

Crestron has no native voice and they use Josh.Ai too

c4 manages a platform to connect various devices.  They do not design hardware as a core business focus.  Most of their hardware is rebranded stuff with a different UI slapped on it.  So in that respect they are doing their job because they integrate Alexa and Google Home as well as Josh.Ai

 

[wnpublic]

Funny how everyone is different.  Wife and teenagers find using voice command totally embarrassing for any purpose, on any platform. Teenagers also totally ignore the whole house audio we had put in their rooms in favor of AirPods.  Whole house in their rooms is used exclusively for me to send TTS messages to them like “get up”. 
 

Point is that no one should assume that their use case is one that so obviously should be implemented, that it’s criminal for C4 or anyone else not to have done it. 

[rf9000]

14 minutes ago, wnpublic said:

Funny how everyone is different.  Wife and teenagers find using voice command totally embarrassing for any purpose, on any platform. Teenagers also totally ignore the whole house audio we had put in their rooms in favor of AirPods.  Whole house in their rooms is used exclusively for me to send TTS messages to them like “get up”. 
 

Point is that no one should assume that their use case is one that so obviously should be implemented, that it’s criminal for C4 or anyone else not to have done it. 

Not criminal. But should be an option if one desires it. I would suspect that most people out there install ceiling speakers to listen to music, right? Hence the reason that having voice control over it would be handy. In my situation, I would be looking at $9000+ in order to do this. Kinda irritates me when I’ve dropped the kind of money I have on C4 assuming this would be a class 101 feature, and then find out I have to spend all this extra money to do it. Can’t the T4 screens with Alexa accept commands like this?  For instance in the kitchen, if the touch screen in there is given the commend to play certain music in that room, this can’t be done? Just seems so odd to me that it can’t. I mean you are giving the command to a native C4 device, but this device can’t relay this to the C4 system?

[dinom]

T4 screens don’t have Alexa built-in. 

[rf9000]

19 minutes ago, dinom said:

T4 screens don’t have Alexa built-in. 

Oh, thought they did. Would be a nice solution though

[zaphod]

1 hour ago, rf9000 said:

Not criminal. But should be an option if one desires it. I would suspect that most people out there install ceiling speakers to listen to music, right? Hence the reason that having voice control over it would be handy. In my situation, I would be looking at $9000+ in order to do this. Kinda irritates me when I’ve dropped the kind of money I have on C4 assuming this would be a class 101 feature, and then find out I have to spend all this extra money to do it. Can’t the T4 screens with Alexa accept commands like this?  For instance in the kitchen, if the touch screen in there is given the commend to play certain music in that room, this can’t be done? Just seems so odd to me that it can’t. I mean you are giving the command to a native C4 device, but this device can’t relay this to the C4 system?

It still isn't clear to me why you can't do what you want. Can't you do what @bdo21 suggested?  Does that not do exactly what you want? If you are in the kitchen and say "Alexa, play Maroon 5" then it will start playing in the kitchen.

Again the complexity is brought about when you go from many input sources (aka Echo Dot microphones in many rooms) to many output sources (aka music zones).  If everything is one input source and one output source in one room only then it is easy.

[DLite]

1 hour ago, rf9000 said:

Oh, thought they did. Would be a nice solution though

@bdo21 has a cool solution that you should consider.  That said, if voice control is critical to your family, you might also want to give Sonos a serious look.  We are probably a high-maintenance family, but I am certain I would get objections if we lost the ability to see track info on C4 touch screens.  Even the 0.5 second delay might be a bridge too far in our house.  

Alexa voice control over Sonos works seamlessly.  And, while the drawbacks of Sonos for C4 are well-documented on this forum, I will say that many of those drawbacks have been eliminated or mitigated with the latest release of Roon's C4 driver.  The Sonos + Roon Nucleus combination now features good  -- albeit not 100% error-free -- C4 integration. With a Roon Nucleus installed and linked to your Sonos speakers, you can select and play tracks from Qobuz, Tidal, or your music library on Sonos from C4 touch screens.  As a bonus, Roon's stand-alone app is also a pleasure to use.

[Rob21]

I have echo flex’s throughout my house and I use voice scenes to play whatever I want wherever I want. I know it’s a little more tedious because you need to create all the scenes, but my family loves it. For example when I say, “Alexa, play billy Joel in the kitchen”. The Billy Joel Pandora station will play in the kitchen. It would be nice if it were possible to avoid saying the room you wanted to play the music in but that’s not really a big deal. This seems to be the best solution for what you’re looking for that I know of at least.