Is it possible to use Roon & Alexa?

[Filipe_Cunha]

Hi,

Does anyone know if I can use Amazon alexa with roon for playback music?

If there is a way could you point me in the right direction?

Thanks

Filipe

[BlackJack]

There are already several Feature Requests for Alexa. You can use the forum search to find them.
Feel free to add your thoughts to any of them.

[Filipe_Cunha]

Hi @BlackJack,

I’ve spent some time looking for answers on the forum, and it seems it is possible but the implementation might not be very straight forward. Do you know of a blog that shows what steps I need to do?

Thank

Filipe

[BlackJack]

Do you know of a blog that shows what steps I need to do?

If that were the case, i’d had done so.

Main Thread:

Alexa voice control

Now that the Amazon API is available, it would be fun to control Roon via Alexa. “Alexa, next track on Roon” or “Alexa, play <artist / album> on Roon in the living room” etc.

Excerpt which tells the official state of things

Alexa voice control

This project is in the back burner… It never worked well… Alexa seems to fail badly when music is playing, and the fact that Roon sounds like Room makes it even worse. We could release it, but it’d be a very poor product. Additionally, no one on our team would want to live with it, so it would slowly wither and just be a sore spot for Roon members who would expect a high quality product. The idea is great, but the implementation isn’t there… We will revisit with future software upd…

Tinkering:

My vision, thoughts?

Hi fellow tinkerer. This is absolutely doable. In fact on my own setup, i’m able to use Alexa to switch on all required components and resume Roon playback automatically. I’m also able to search for an artist and start playing the tracks using Alexa. My components: Roon running on a Windows 10 PC (on via WOL, off via powershell script, Roon control via custom Alexa skill) AV Receiver Pioneer VSX-921 (on/off, volume, input selection controlled via network interface) Klipsch R15-PM active speak…

Ask FunkBrother for details.

[Filipe_Cunha]

Hi @FunkBrother ,

Thats great :-D, will give it a try. let you know how it goes

Many thanks

Filipe

[Filipe_Cunha]

Hi @FunkBrother,

My set up is composed i5 of a laptop that currently runs room core (not the one with the GUI), do you know if it is possible for me to add the javanode on the same server and run the commands from there?

If at all possible, would be interesting to hear your take on possible advantages/disadvantages of this type of solutions?

Many thanks

Filipe

[Phil_McGee]

I’ve written a published Alexa skill called MediaServer that control Logitech Media Server. It has nearly 100 commands and allows choosing albums/artists/songs/genres etc by voice. Plus, of course, simple stuff like play/pause/stop/next/prev/goto and volume. Methinks it should be pretty easy to port for Roon as the voice model is defined and it should only be a question of swapping the API calls.

Where might I find the most complete docs on the API ? The more the merrier !

Phil

[hook_menu_alter]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I stumbled upon this so thought I’d add some info in case anyone else finds themselves here.

I run home automation software called “home assistant” which can be controlled by Alexa. Home assistant also has a roon integration which exposes the roon endpoints to home assistant as media player devices which can then be controlled by various services (start/stop/pause).

With a bit of tinkering (which I will do at some point), it would be possible to hook up some “Alex, play roon”, “Alexa pause roon” (and maybe volume) commands using home assistant as the driver. I very much doubt you’d ever get it to the point of “Alexa, play boards of canada on roon”, but who knows.

Anyway, you’d need to be a little bit tech savvy to get it up and running, and it’s probably a bit limited in what it can do, but just thought I’d put the idea out there.

For me personally, I;ll probably try this as I love tinkering, but I find controlling music with Alexa very flaky so I’ll likely do it then never use it.

If I get around to this and get it up and running, I’ll post some instructions.

[Michael_Cataldo]

Did this ever complete?