It does work. It just doesn’t do everything. Start a queue playing on a Google Home Mini. You can then use voice commands to raise or lower the volume, to pause and resume the play, to skip to the next track, or back to the previous track. Very useful with Radio, or with Internet Radio.
i am just disappointed… I do use Tidal linked within Roon and Auralic - fixed volume etc…
so what can i do with such a setup? CAn i control roon to play specific artist/song from tidal/… to pause / skip etc? To play Roon radio… i am wondering … it means it will play roon internet radio like mckintosh by its name?
thanks
says nothing about google mini…
I don’t know how to say it more clearly than I already have.
@Bill_Janssen no idea why there is no official description how does it work with google mini…
also i dont wanna playback on google mini … i clearly stated i want to control my network streamer via google mini if possible…
Yes, and you can, to a limited extent.
@Bill_Janssen and thats what i was asking … where is some documentation , description of that extent…
If you don’t intend to use the Mini for playback, then the answer is different. No, there’s no way to use Google Assistant to control the Roon Core.
Any comment from ROON if this will be possible ?
Would be awesome to start ROON and speakers with voice control.
I posted elsewhere a detailed description of how hard this would be to do. The real problem is that track names, album names, and even artist names often have tricky plays on words in them, which would confuse the heck out of the plain-vanilla voice recognition in Google Assistant. I can imagine a very compute-intensive way of doing it, provided you could get the raw speech utterances from Google’s server, but it would require the owner of the Roon set-up to train up the system by speaking a lot of specific words and phrases so that all the phonemes in their text phrases could be analyzed.
Like you say … probably much harder than what we think .
I would be happy with " hey google play something i like on ROON " and then it picks something ive market as favourites .
If i want to listen to something specific , I would use the roon remote to navigate.
If you really, really want to be able to at least do basic play/pause/skip/volume control on Google Home (GH) for a source playing to another Roon endpoint then I’m 99% sure that it is possible but only if you are willing to invest time and money into it. The solution is, if you don’t have one already, to buy a Logitech Harmony Hub smart remote (LHH) then use the Roon “Deep Harmony” (DH) extension to respond to play/pause/volume-up/mute/etc actions programmed on the LHH. Then it is possible to link GH to a LHH so that you can use voice commands such as “OK Google, ask harmony to pause audio” and it will get the LHH to issue the pause command that will then be received by the DH extension which will cause Roon to pause. Same deal with muting, volume control etc. At that point if you find the “ask harmony to” phrases too clunky you can just set up GH shortcuts so that for instance “pause Roon” maps to the full invocation of the LHH service required.
As is probably clear, there is quite a lot of set up involved and if you don’t already have a LHH they aren’t cheap (but I would thoroughly recommend them). I do have an LHH and I have it integrated with GH to control my TV but I confess that installing DH and getting that all integrated is something that is still on my to-do list so, having not done it myself, I can’t 100% guarantee it would work but I do know that the GH to LHH integration works, and others have got the LHH to DH to Roon integration working, so I don’t see why GH -> LHH -> DH -> Roon integration wouldn’t work. One more time for emphasis though, that would just get you basic volume and transport controls, it’s not going to get you “OK Google, play David Bowie Low” music selection functionality.
with Roon every feature request turns into the Everest, even though most users would be happy with the local hilltop.
For example with Google assistant - most users would be happy to transfer music from one zone to another, control volume and transport while leaving complex search to the Roon interface. But no, Roon would not even consider it unless they can reliably and precisely find that obscure Fats Waller record from 1910 that you didn’t even know you wanted to find. Not that they can find it now anyway…
just realized that:
- if you enable a Google Home speaker as a Roon endpoint
- you can then use voice commands for transport and volume (that is GH’s volume, not Roon’s volume)
So in a limited use case this can work - of course you need to initiate playback in Roon.
Then it’s only my imagination that thinks a command from Google Home can be understood by Roon for any other endpoint. I am sure there are many reasons why that would not be possible and a few why it would be possible.
Yes, Google Assistant support for pause, resume and volume would be great!
It works when using Chromecast groups including at least one Google Home device (or an individual Google Home). But the idea, at least for me, is to squeeze out some better sound quality, once playback happens on a Roon endpoint, Google won’t help any longer…
I couldn’t agree more. If Roon search worked well, it would be one thing – it’s not like Roon handles typos or can even find a piece most of the time when the title is an exact match.
That doesn’t mean I don’t find Roon search useful.
Roon could even do stepwise. Start with Genres. Then add artists/composers
so it doesnt work still?
thanks
No, and probably won’t in the near future. Google wasn’t making money on Assistant, so they decided to remove most third-party interactions with it. The exception is home automation, though. If Roon were put forward as home automation, might still be able to do it.
@bill_janssen
ah i see, well i have roon integrated into the Home asisstant, so was wondering if there is an option to play/pause etc via voice… thanks