[greggsy]

I’m actually pretty surprised how bad the intercom ecosystem is these days.

Why aren’t there more ‘semi dumb’ Ethernet or wifi products that just let you announce that dinner is ready? It doesn’t need to be a fully ruggedised commercial system like this one or a fully integrated cloud managed solution like ring.

The cheap no name wireless ones can’t handle comms between rooms, let alone across a house.

The security implications aren’t insurmountable - you could use pairing codes if there are multiple on the network.

I’ve accepted that it’s a niche market, and that the only solution is to use Asterix with a some cheapo voip phones.

[unsnap_biceps]

Apple's HomePod Mini and Google Home and Alexa all support intercom modes. I'd presume they typically handle the home case for the majority of folks.

[pprotas]

HomePod Mini is a waste of money, unless you like screaming at your dumb robot that never understands what you want it to do

Setting timers works well though

[jon-wood]

HomePod Mini is primarily a speaker you can AirPlay to which happens to have some basic voice control functionality. I'd really love them to be a bit more usable (in particular I want to be able to change the app it sends reminders to) but my experience has been that they're fine for music, timers, and basic smart home control.

[dylan604]

> they're fine for music

I guess my age is showing, but isn't it just a mono speaker? so much is lost in music without stereo imaging. it's one of the main eyebrow raising things to me about most bluetooth portable speakers. If you're mainly listening to podcasts or playing lullabyes to a kids room, sure, but we're adults here and personally I like listening to stereo way to much for these to be an option.

[jon-wood]

Definitely showing how deep down the Apple rabbit hole I am but I have a pair of them connected to my Apple TV which are the ones I use for music/TV/games. The single one in the kitchen really only gets used for podcasts and audio from the iPad I have for watching YouTube and trashy TV while cooking.

[dylan604]

are you saying you have 2 pod minis that act as a stereo pair? what is that experience like?

[raesene9]

+1 to this we had a set of HomePod minis for intercom and not only do they not work reliably, but the diagnostics provided when they fail are non-existent, making it hard to improve the setup.

[nkrisc]

> Setting timers works well though

This is Siri’s primary use case, at least I assume so based on my experience.

As long as the timer isn’t for 50 minutes.

[mrloop]

Or between 13 and 19 which intermittently is interpreted as 30 or 40 etc. Maybe it's just my enunciation.

[samcolson42]

They're nice little speakers that also do well when controlling things through Apple Home, setting alarms, timers, reminders etc.

I'd love to know the % of Alexa Dots (whatever the small ones are called now) that are used for anything more than this.

[FinnKuhn]

I have one for settings timers when cooking and playing music.

Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but I don't see anything else I would want it to do.

[arjie]

We have Google Home Minis in every room and the screens in bedroom and kitchen and the only thing that works reliably to message intra-room is to say "Hey Google, broadcast message" because half of the time it will tell me it can't send messages yet. If someone knows what I'm doing wrong I'd love to hear it since this would be a great feature.

To be honest, I'm honestly sick of Google Home's approach to this since the Gemini update has turned everything really slow and I'm getting close to the point where I'd rather home-roll a full system myself that works reliably instead of the crapshoot that this is. Home Assistant seems to have a functionality bridge to Google Home connected devices like my blinds or cameras so I should be able to retain the edge devices but I have half a mind to just dump the whole thing and start over.

[mystraline]

If they're that bad performance (and terrible spy devices to boot) why haven't you removed them?

[adamesque]

At least on the HomePod side, intercom is at best a half-baked feature and at worst an infuriation machine. It uses a cumbersome voice trigger ("siri, tell <room>…") to begin recording audio, with no clear indication of when recording began and no way to know for sure that the audio was directed where you wanted it to go.

To respond is similarly cumbersome and soon you give up completely. I can only assume it was designed by someone whose parents were killed in an intercom-related disaster and has sworn revenge.

I bought a mini for my office with this purpose in mind, but it has been a total waste.

[greggsy]

Tried that. Hated it.

[zer00eyz]

Everything involving audio is an annoying mess.

The first step is getting speakers in a room: there are tons of products that do this, apple, google, Sonos.

Most of them have the audio quality of a bag of instruments.

There are tons of class D amps that you can hook up to speakers: Wiim, acrylic and so on... this will run you anywhere from 100 bucks to 500 and thats before you buy the speakers. Most of these will be great for playing music and projecting your voice.

The moment you involve a TV... well things get ugly because your going to want arc for HDMI and your going to want a center channel cause with out it your likely in subtitle hell half the time. This will get expensive a Sonos sound bar is a few hundred and if you want something better well... Let's say you can get to the point of making a GPU look affordable real quick.

Now that you can play audio, how do you hear it... well your phone works and there are tons of satellites out there.

You're now going to need to run home assistant to "interrupt" what ever is playing (if something is) to play your message and then return what ever it was to its current state.

After trying out WIIM, Acrylic, some high end stereo gear I just settled on half assed audio quality and bought more Sonos gear. I kept a single WIIM unit, cheap amp, decent speakers and a sub around for when I want to really listen to music but other than that I tolerate sonos' middling quality for day to day use (and I am, by no means an audiophile).

[fragmede]

There's Butterfly and another company I can't remember and undoubtedly more, that have expensive systems for large complexes, so the niche is the small buildings that don't have a ton of money. Maybe the softwarepocalypse can help with that.

[stavros]

The Home Assistant Voice will let you do whatever. I wrote a small server that accepts the audio and plays audio back, but you can also send audio whenever you want. They're very nice little devices.

[lnx01]

*Asterisk

[bombcar]

I had a surprisingly working intercom setup with Asterisk and some old Cisco phones set to auto-answer on speaker. But ... complicated setup and eventually it fell into disuse.

[prmoustache]

> Why aren’t there more ‘semi dumb’ Ethernet or wifi products that just let you announce that dinner is ready?

Because of 2 reasons

1) this is very antisocial behavior.

2) so many people have a mobile phone at arm's reach a majority of the time so there you have your intercom.

Well educated members of an household would know when dinner is ready because they would actually help make it ready for everyone. Occasionally one teenager could legitimately focus on homework but it is not actually a bad thing that someone has to move its ass and walk upstairs to knock at their door and tell them. We call that free exercise, much cheaper than a fitness subscription.

When I hear about home assistant and domotic in general, the only image that comes to me is those scenes in Wall-E where people live in a flying armchair with a holo screen in front of their face 24/7, their only interaction with a physical world being to only move their arms once in a while to grab a soda.

When I was a kid I remember a house we rented for a while came with intercom using the electrical lines. Past the initial novelty, they mostly collected dust and ended up being unplugged.

[greggsy]

It’s not antisocial… at all?

I’m genuinely confused why you would think that.

> Well educated members of an household would know when dinner is ready because they would actually help make it ready for everyone.

This is one of the most obnoxious things I have read all year.

[mytailorisrich]

Needing an app or tech device to announce to your spouse and children at home that dinner is ready is beyond antisocial, actually. It's ridiculously sad and pathetic.

And then people will complain that children these days spend their time in front of a screen...

I think @prmoustache is also referring to manners in general.

[OkayPhysicist]

Maybe you live in a smaller space than I'm imagining, but if Dad's in the kitchen making dinner and other Dad is in the garage trying to figure out what he's going to need for the backpacking trip next weekend and the youngest kid is in the office with her headphones in listening to music while doing her homework and the eldest is upstairs chatting with his friends on Discord, then the options are

A) scramble around the entire house going "dinner in 5 minutes"

B) yell the same, hope people hear it, and negatively affect your mood

C) have some sort of system that lets everyone know with the tap of a button.

[prmoustache]

You might want to learn the concept of delegation. Kid in the office can tell their sibling who can then tell other dad.

Additionally, cooking in group is a great moment to have a conversation, much more than the actual dinner where everybody is chewing.

[OkayPhysicist]

Cooking a family dinner together is a fun group activity, like a board game night. Which is great, say, one night a week. Feeding a family has to happen every night, where more can be done, faster, by a single person. And if you can't figure out how to eat and hold a conversation, you have failed at quite possibly the single oldest human activity.

And the delegation approach defeats the entire purpose of the fore-warning, which is to allow people to wrap up whatever they were doing, out of respect for their time.

[fragmede]

> Kid in the office can tell their sibling who can then tell other dad.

The trope is mom tells the kid to tell dad dinner's ready, and kid just yells really loud to dad, while mom looks on with exasperation. Or was that just my childhood?