Support for broadcasts

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Support for broadcasting to Google Home devices would be very useful. Broadcasts have an advantage over e.g. using tts aimed at the media_player.device_name entity, as it won’t stop any music from playing.

Describe the solution you’d like

A new service and notifications integration to trigger a broadcast to Google Home devices.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

This other project works, and I’ve used it in the past, however I’m not using HassIO any more, and would prefer not to add yet another container 😃

https://github.com/AndBobsYourUncle/hassio-addons/tree/master/google-assistant-webserver

Additional context

[ArnyminerZ]

This is already implemented in the Google Cast integration. I believe this is not the focus of this integration in particular, so you should use Google Cast.

However, I think it’s interesting to merge the two projects together, though I don’t think Home Assistant would be really interested on this change, since the focus of the integrations is different. I leave the conversation open for other contributions.

[kiall]

Can you explain how one can use the Google Cast integration to broadcast a message without interrupting the currently playing media?

That’s the thing - you can’t use the Google Cast integration to send an audio message without interrupting music. It’ll always stop the music.

There’s a separate Broadcast feature, and that one can be used. The project I linked above is a Home Assistant OS Addon that implements it - however I’m not on Haas OS anymore, and don’t want to switch back - hence would prefer an integration like this one would add the feature 😃