Voice Assistant Satellite: "Failed to perform the action assist_satellite/announce. expected str for dictionary value @ data['preannounce_media_id']"

Hi all,

I’m currently setting up the Home Assistant Voice Preview and running into an issue with the assist_satellite.announce action. The voice input and recognition works perfectly — I can say things like “turn off the lights” and it works, and the wake word (“Hey Jarvis”) is also correctly detected.

However, the assistant doesn’t speak back when I choose ElevenLabs or Piper as the voice. Instead, I get the following error in my logs:

Failed to perform the action assist_satellite/announce. expected str for dictionary value @ data['preannounce_media_id']

Here’s what I’ve tried:

• I can test the ElevenLabs voice output via the “Test” button and it plays just fine on my PC.
• I can chat with the voice assistant in the web interface and responses are fine.
• When I switch TTS to “Google Translate” voice, it does speak — but Google Generative AI (Gemini) seems not to understand anything.
• I’m using the Focused Local Assistant with:
  • faster-whisper for speech-to-text (Dutch)
  • ElevenLabs or Piper for TTS (Dutch)
  • Google Generative AI as the conversation agent (fallback if local fails)

This only seems to happen when a voice response is triggered from the satellite — it tries to do the announce action but fails on preannounce_media_id.

Any help would be hugely appreciated. Is there something missing in the configuration for the announce service or a workaround for this bug?

Thanks in advance!

1 post - 1 participant

Read full topic