I set up some players to be speakers for Alexa. Works perfect and Alexa can control them.
I can also add the speakers to groups in Alexa (e.g. livingroom) and say “Alexa, turn myplayername in livingroom on.”
But I can not add these speakers as preferred speaker for a group, so that it would be possible to say “Alexa, turn music in livingroom on”.
I use Endpoint.Speaker on a openhab group and PlaybackController.playback, Switchable and Speaker.volume each on a appropriate channel of my stereo system.
Am I doing something wrong or is this not yet supported by the alexa smarthome binding?
From my understanding, the preferred speaker functionality is unfortunately only supported by Echo devices and some approved third party speakers (e.g. Sonos). I think this integration is not only about sending commands to a device but actually about the ability to stream music to a single speaker or a bunch of them when added to a speaker group.
No worries. I found this documentation that corroborates my initial thought. As I expected, it is restricted to commercial device makers with multi-room protocols for music playback.