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A "what did I miss?" briefing with Home Assistant and Sonos

A summary when you want it, instead of ten push notifications. How to collect events and have them read out over Sonos.

Published
Reading time
3 min read
Level
Advanced
Tested on HA
2026.10
Lees in het Nederlands

The washing machine is done. The robot vacuum has been round. The front door was open while you were out. You want to know all of it, just not as three separate push notifications during a meeting. Put those events in a queue and you get to choose when you hear them, which also means you actually will.

The idea

  1. Events go into a queue, your inbox.
  2. At a moment that suits you, such as a button, a voice command or arriving home, that queue is read out and emptied.
  3. Only what genuinely cannot wait goes out as a push.

The queue

The simplest queue is a to-do list from the Local To-do integration. Each event adds an item to it:

- action: todo.add_item
  target:
    entity_id: todo.briefing
  data:
    item: Wasmachine is klaar

Show that list on your dashboard as an inbox with a counter. Tasks you still have to do yourself, like putting the bin out or emptying the water tank, get ticked off right there.

One announcement script

Build one script for all your announcements: a short chime, then the text over TTS, at a fixed low volume. In a living room 25 % works well. Have the script restore the speakers to whatever they were doing afterwards, using sonos.snapshot and sonos.restore. If the TV plays through a soundbar, the TV audio dips briefly and comes back, and that is the difference between a briefing you keep and a briefing you switch off within a week.

What goes where

Event Push Briefing
Washing machine done Yes Yes
Robot vacuum done No Yes
Front door open while nobody is home Yes Yes
Waste collection tomorrow Evening before Yes

When guest mode is on, or a known visitor is in the calendar, the briefing skips those notifications. That way you do not get an alarm notification when it is just the cleaner.

Reading it out on request

Hang the read-out script on a spare button in the living room or on an Assist command. If you have a language model set as your conversation agent, it can summarise the list rather than reading everything out verbatim. Keep long summaries off your phone, though, because an inbox reads far better there than a wall of text in a notification.

Frequently asked questions

Can I do this without Sonos? Yes, because any speaker that can play TTS will work. Just replace the Sonos snapshot with your own way of restoring the volume.

How do I stop the list getting too long? Merge identical events ("three motion events at the front door") and clear items out after a day. Nobody listens to a twenty-line briefing.

Which notifications should still go out as a push? Only what cannot wait. Notifications per person covers how to aim them properly, and waste collection reminders has an example of a notification with an action button.

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