I remember seeing someone build a system that let him speak alerts all over his house with Pi and what I think was MQTT based. I am installing a Android PoE tablet in every major room of the house and need a way to speak alerts to all the rooms.
I don’t know about that other solution, but Tasker can come in here as well.
There is a “Say” action which will use the TTS engine on the device to speak the text.
So if you use something like Notify my Android, Tasker can intercept that notification and speak the contents of the text. You should be able to set it up to broadcast to all or just one device. However, NMA requires Internet so it might not fit the bill for you.
In that case, there is a plugin for Tasker, AutoNotification, which will let Tasker intercept any notification so if you have a way to send a notification without going out to the cloud (maybe OwnCloud?) you will have a nice and self contained system.
Great! Got Tasker, I guess I now just need a script on OpenHab to talk to Tasker?
I used Notify My Android. There is an Action for Tasker and the NMA app has Tasker integration which lets me craft specific messages that Tasker can parse and react to. I honestly haven’t done much with it in many many months and don’t remember the details of what I did to make it work. I know Pushbullet works as well. There appears to be a plugin called AutoRemote that will allow two way communication with IFTTT.
It is less than good but you could set up a time triggered profile to poll the OH REST API for updates to an Item which would keep everything internal and prevent the reliance on a cloud service but … polling. Yuck, but it would work. There is at least one plugin, RESTask which would make this a little easier. Joao (the guy behind all the AutoX plugins who is also big into home automation though seems more focused on Vera) has a beta AutoWeb which might be usable.
What I wish they had was an MQTT plugin that could subscribe. There is one that can publish which I tried out and it works, though you will want to get a trusted cert rather than using a self signed cert or else you will have a perpetual warning notification that “Someone could be monitoring your network traffic”.
Other push notification tools should work as well. For example, if you use Hangouts (I think this would work with Hangouts) and the AutoNotification plugin for Tasker you can send a chat which will result in a Notification that Tasker picks up and can parse and react to. With another plugin, AutoInput you can program a task to compose and send the message as well. For that matter, you could send a notification through my.openhab and have Tasker pick that one up.
Tasker is a lot like OH. It lets you connect a lot of different things in a lot of different ways and program behaviors based on events. It was my first foray into automation and it is the one killer app that prevents me from even considering an iPhone. As with my house, my phone should know what I want it to do and just do it without my telling it to.
Coming from OH, the event based nature of Tasker will not be too alien. You have Profiles which are kicked off by one or more events (think the when clause of an OH Rule) and Tasks which is a little bit of code that runs in response (think the stuff between the then and end of an OH Rule).