on the used market an older smart speaker from Sonos can be had for a song
at this point and so they are becoming a really interesting opportunity for you
especially if you have Samsung smartthings in your home to create all
kinds of different automation capabilities and get a lot out of a
connected speaker hello Automators thanks for tuning in again I'm Brian from
automate your life and today I'm going to take the frustration out of
automation by giving you a whole new option with the sonos speakers you either
already have in your smart home or giving you an option for maybe going out
and getting a new connected smart speaker and doing something really
different because right now it can be very difficult to create audible
notifications of events in your smart home we've seen Amazon do a little bit
of this with some of their devices and some of their routines Google really
still can't do a lot of this and so you're smart speakers can actually be
really difficult to integrate with automation but especially if you have
this smartthings hub over here or the smartthings platform in general even
without the hub you can start to create notifications for things like people
arriving or automation events within your smart home or you can cause music
to be playing at different times throughout your home or based on
different events so let me show you how to do a lot of this let's start with the
type of speaker that you're going to need now this is I play one so this is
more than a couple of years old at this point
and that means basically anything up from there all the new speakers are
going to have this capability for integration within the smartthings
platform now I'm going to assume that you've already set up your sono speaker
I'm not going to show you the base setup I actually have a very old video for
doing that and how it's calibrated and how it's set up but once you've done
that and it's in the Sonos application you now have a very easy way within the
new SmartThings app to go ahead and add in this speaker so let me show you how
to do that very quickly so you're going to go to add a new
device as per usual as you would within the SmartThings application and then
you're going to search for Sonos once you do that you're going to pick speaker
and you can go ahead and find your exact speaker at that point once it's found
the device you're going to add it as you would any other device and you can place
it in a room and rename the speaker within SmartThings platform now that you
have your sonos speaker in the application you actually get a whole new
interface so you can scroll through the home page and you will actually find
your sonos speaker or meaning multiple sonos speakers they come in in groups or
as individual speakers so you can actually just in the top right hit the
play button and it will start so that's a quick interface but you can go into
the speaker itself you can change the volume very quickly and then you can
also choose any of your favorites and this is maybe the big thing you want to
do inside the Sonos application is get your favorites or your my Sonos list
that's what it's called today all set up and then you can pick from any of those
favorites through this basic interface now you can also edit the device name
and you can change the room it's in you can delete the device if you're not
happy with the integration for any reason in the future so it's not stuck
here and then you can see the activity history within the device now that you
have that basic interface down let's go deeper let's have a little more fun with
this so you can go into the automation section of the application and you can
actually create an automation with this speaker and you can use it on the if
stop side of any automation or you can use it on the then side of any
automations within the if side you have media playback and you can trigger when
this starts to play or stops playing or pauses you can actually trigger other
automations you can go ahead and use the mute side group volume and you can
actually have it match a certain volume level or you can say equal or below or
equal our above a certain level and you can do the same thing with a group so
you can mute the whole group so those are your triggers on the vent side of
integration you can actually choose a lot of different things
you can choose media playback but you can't choose the specific song or the
specific favorite that it's going to start it's whatever's kind of queued up
on the device so you can cause it to trigger to play you can also cause it to
go next in previous so if you actually want to create automations like with
things like buttons where you're just pressing the button and and I'm doing
this in a number of different ways already you can go ahead and go to the
next song you can change volumes you can change
the the mute and all of that and you can do it by group now one of the most
powerful things is actually the delay this action and you can customize
exactly how long you want to delay that action but really what it allows you to
do is something as simple as when you return home delay a little bit so once
your phone has been recognized delay a little bit and have this speaker start
playing so that you walk into the space and the music is really just starting
for you one of the most powerful things that you can do is the notification
capability so you can get this device to say all kinds of things based on what's
going on in your home and this is inside of the smart app section now what you
will find is every one you create creates a new one so you can see the
notification of arrival and the notification of leak that's what I've
called these things and what they are doing is they're notifying me through
this speaker what is going on so the notification is smart things detected a
flood on this speaker you could pick the groups or you could pick the individual
speaker the water sensor is my my basis and you can see I've chosen all of my
different water sensors and do I want to resume music currently right after the
notification has occurred yes do I want a specific mode and then
there's the name now I'll show you every one of these that you set up is a brand
new one so you hit the plus and you add a smart app now what this is called is
the speaker companion and this will be there all the time you can go ahead and
that happened at any time now you can have the control of music basically so
you can play stop pause or skip you play those custom notifications and that's
what we're gonna go through or you can play a weather report and that's based
on the location you set inside of Samsung smartthings so I've gone into
notification here and I'm going to choose custom message you can choose any
of these other ones and you saw my leak detection one said smart things detected
a flood that's that's great that's easy that's what will come out of this device
but you can choose a custom message and then you will actually get to type in
what the message is so I'm going to type in hello Automator x' I'm going to
choose my office so nose and that's where it sits in my home and then
basically I'm going to choose what the thing that I need to have happen is so
I'm going to choose the button and you can see that it's just the pressed so
it's not allowing me to choose the DoubleTap or the hold on this button I
could choose any of the mode so I'm going to choose all of them and then I'm
going to assign a name I hit done and this is a new smart app inside so you
can see button press notification so now that I've set that up inside the
smartthings application it is as simple as pressing this button that's what I've
set up to have a notification come out so let's try it
hello so you can see a bit of a delay there that's probably my whole home
network or a bunch of things going on there but this button did manage to
trigger that whole thing to go on now I just want to show you quickly all the
different things that you can trigger off of here so motion contact sensors
are multi-purpose sensors acceleration so if you have that vibration or the
motion detection capability on those multi-purpose sensors those are there
the switches on and off arrival/departure so you can use your
phone or the rival sensors the water sensors which we already talked about
button presses and even changing modes so you could set specific modes where
you wanted notifications to come out of this device for and then at certain
scheduled times you can have this just trigger to remind you to do something
now let's go another level deeper and that's how I usually like to run these
kind of tutorial videos is go a little bit deeper now if there's something
specific you're looking for go ahead leave that down in the comments below
right now I want that interaction between us and I always help people as
much as I can with in the comments section now the other thing that I think
you're going to ask about is can I integrate with X or can I do a more
complicated scenario than just the simple one device trigger and the answer
to that is yes you absolutely can but this is going to take virtual switches
and virtual switches will give you the ability to use if this and that to
trigger on and off those virtual switches if you'd like and you can also
use those virtual switches to create a more custom automation so let's go much
deeper here I'm going to run you through a full tutorial of how virtual switches
can get set up and then I'm going to show you how you can apply this in your
smart home to a much more complicated situation
the first thing you're going to need is this Samsung smartthings classic
application and this is going to be a short timeline that you need this but
this is how you can create your verse your first virtual switch in the Samsung
smartthings system and then once you do that you can go back to the smartthings
application and create new virtual switches going forward so you can see I
could choose a switch or a dimmer switch and then you can go ahead and name the
device whatever you want it becomes a physical device in the application now
once you switch over to that existing smartthings application you will now
find the virtual device creator sitting there and you can add a new one simply
by choosing which type of switch you would like and then you choose the name
and hit done and this will create another one for you if you ever need
another virtual switch now let's go ahead and create the new smart app the
speaker companion smart app that is going to be based off of the virtual
switch that we just created now I'm going to choose to play a notification
and then the custom message that we've used earlier in the video I'll type in
new custom message and then choose the speaker that I'm going to play this on
and our trigger event is going to be the switch that we just created that virtual
switch so I'm going to scroll down and find my virtual switch now I could do
any of the other things that we talked about but really I'm just going to pick
a name and hit done now that you've created that virtual switch what we're
going to use that virtual switch is for the trigger event for our overall
speaker companion notification in this example specifically I'm going to say
that someone is at home as one of my if conditions and it's within a certain
period of time plus they have turned on one of my plugs or lights and you could
pick whatever device you'd like this is three conditions and clearly not what
you're able to do with just the basic speaker companion so this is going much
deeper the then side of the automation will be to turn on that virtual switch
and I will also choose to auto turn off that device
that you can choose any timeline you'd like with that but that's what I'm going
to choose here and I'm just going to choose to turn it off after a minute
this will mean that your conditions can continue to occur time and time again so
you have to think about when you want to do that you might set up a whole
separate automation for say at the end of the day just to turn off that virtual
switch again and then that will ensure that it only happens once per day now
that we have that virtual switch coming on on the exact condition that we want
our automation system will actually trigger all the way to this speaker
playing that custom notification now of course you might have a certain specific
condition that you'd like with Samsung smartthings and I know how complex these
things can be so go ahead leave that down below otherwise you might want to
watch our full walkthrough of the new Samsung smartthings application not a
lot of people are ready for that application and so you might need some
help navigating that's a full walkthrough it's indexed so you can have
a look at what you exactly want to watch within that application otherwise guys
thanks for watching today and of course don't hate automate