This post is just to give other people ideas for projects – I’ve created a proof-of-concept, but it’s far from elegant, and will probably never be user-friendly.
I now have the ability to tell Siri to do certain operations in Roon. How? It’s pretty gross, but it works:
I created a scene in the Home app for each voice command (e.g., “Play Jazz Favorites in the Living Room,” “Move the music to the bedroom,” “Pause everything”).
I made each scene set the fake lightbulb to a particular brightness (e.g., “Play Jazz Favorites in the Living Room” is 1% brightness, “Pause everything” is 2% brightness, and so on).
I wrote a Python script using the python-roon library which subscribes (via paho-mqtt) to the MQTT messages indicating when the brightness of the fake lightbulb changes, and send the appropriate command to Roon (e.g., "when the lightbulb is set to 1% brightness, play the playlist called ‘Jazz Favorites’ in the zone called ‘Living Room’).
It is janky! But it works. Next step will be reducing the number of moving parts by having the Python script talk directly to HomeKit via the HAP-Python library, to avoid having to use Homebridge, homebridge-mqtt, and a mqtt server (all of which I happened to already have set up for other projects, so this was the fastest way to do a proof-of-concept).
The thing it is most useful for is the commands “Hey Siri, surf” and “Hey Siri, rain” which turn on those sounds in the bedroom at low volume, and for moving the music from zone to zone. It just takes the currently playing zone and moves it where you say. Since I only have three zones, it’s tractable. “Hey Siri, move the music to the Living Room” is easier than “open Roon app / click to open zone list / click on volume icon / click transfer button / click Living Room”
Obviously, it would be even cooler if the Roon iOS app added SiriKit Media Intents. But until that day comes, this gets me a slice of that functionality.
Brilliant solution! Homebridge is already running in my Roon core (cue exasperated gasps from the purists) so this is definitely going to get a run this weekend.
ou might look into homeassistant / https://hass.io for inspiration
it’s complete home automation system, having integration with HomeKit and there is also Roon extension available (there is even separate thread about it on this community site) which allows you to see Roon endpoints as media players, which you can consequently control (play,pause,skip fwd/back, play specific playlist, power on/off endpoint and control it’s volume and mute)
having all this set up i can tell Siri to turn on my audio (it will basically turn on all relevant equipment via infrared / network , set the volume to quiet level, unmute preamp and trigger Roon to start playing my “audio startup” playlist )
it’s still limited to specific playlist you have predefined - e.g. it’s not possible to ask for specific artist/album/song , but it’s already somehow useful to me to go thru power-on and power-off sequence of audio chain or eventually asking to play some predefined playlist from my Roon library
As I watched Apple’s event yesterday and saw the roll out of the HomePod mini all I could think about is how could Roon work with Homekit to start working with Siri. I think it is totally possible to be able to use my phone or watch and say, "Hey Siri, play my classical playlist in the kitchen and it would fire up that playlist in Roon in the room I requested. However, I see that it might be more difficult to run some of the other features of HomePod in a Roon environment. The new intercom feature would require my watch or phone’s microphone to somehow send that voice message into Roon’s core, and parse it back out to the sound systems throughout the house. That might be possible, but I also wonder if Apple will play nice with independent developers to provide the level of functionality that ends up competing with Apple at some level.
What Apple’s presentation on the HomePod mini did demonstrate is where home automation is heading. How Roon jumps on that bandwagon will be interesting to see. It will also be interesting to see how Roon can somehow be agnostic to cater to the Apple, Google, and Amazon worlds. There is already some progress being made in this area through the Thread Group which Apple, Google, and Amazon are members. This might be an area for future Roon development.
I’ve got a couple HomePod minis setup, using the home-assistant roon plug-in.
Control is essentially limited to play start/stop but it’s still pretty great. In two setups I have a stereo on a smart plug, a HomeKit automation turns on roon when the plug goes on and off again when off.
And in our daughters room, roon plays directly to the pod mini when the lights go on in her room, and off again when off.
Before setting up the automations m, a key thing was giving the switch on-off mode a unique name, I called mine Rat. So I can say “hey Siri turn on/off the room rat” and music starts/stops.
I’ve been really impressed with the HomePods ability to hear commands while music is playing, both when it’s via other speakers and from itself. I read several reviews of Alexa failing at this but Siri always gets it.
Maybe it’s time the roon team gets a mini and gives integration another try.
I would add that when you Say hey Siri keyword while having Roon running on macbook, music is momentarily paused so that you don’t need to shout
Even more surprisingly , macbook stops even it’s fans when listening for Siri command - i was quite shocked when discovered this smart OSX feature
WOW…I know my roon remote stops music when my phone rings and the Mac shows an option to answer the call on it…but resumes at full volume again if I pick up the call on my phone again…cant have everything I guess (yet)
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