Home Assistant

RoomCall is a native Home Assistant integration. It runs inside Home Assistant, so there is no separate server: your speakers are the media players Home Assistant already controls, and your rooms are Home Assistant areas.

RoomCall card on a desktop dashboard

Before you start

Home Assistant 2025.6 or newer, with HACS installed.
HTTPS or the companion app for the microphone. Browsers only allow the mic on secure pages, so open Home Assistant through Nabu Casa, a reverse proxy, Tailscale, or the mobile app.
A reachable internal URL. Speakers download each clip from Home Assistant. Check Settings → System → Network → Local network is an address your speakers can reach (for example http://192.168.1.10:8123).

1. Install

HACS (one click)HACS (manual)Without HACS

Click Download, then restart Home Assistant.

HACS → ⋮ → Custom repositories.
Add https://github.com/daredoole/RoomCall as type Integration.
Search RoomCall → Download → restart Home Assistant.

Download roomcall.zip from the latest release, unzip it into /config/custom_components/roomcall/ and restart Home Assistant.

2. Add the integration

Or go to Settings → Devices & services → Add integration → RoomCall.

Pick your speakers. Everything else is under Configure on the integration:

Option	Default	What it does
Speakers	announce-capable players	Media players that make up the intercom
Announcement volume	speaker's current volume	Fixed volume for calls (Sonos)
Microphone boost	0 dB	Raise if phone recordings sound quiet
Text-to-speech engine	your default	Used by `roomcall.broadcast` messages
Chime → chime	Walkie-talkie chirp	Chirp, ding, double beep, rising tones, doorbell, or none
Chime → custom file or URL	—	Your own sound, e.g. `/config/www/chime.mp3`; overrides the chime
Delivery → delay between speakers	250 ms	Stops several Sonos in one home from dropping the same announcement
Delivery → retry	on	Tries a failed speaker once more after a second
Delivery → urgent call volume	0.8	Volume for urgent calls
Quiet hours → start / end / volume / rooms to skip	off	Quieter calls at night that skip bedrooms
Notifications and replies → phones	none	Phones notified about each call (not the caller's own)
Notifications and replies → dashboard	—	Path of the dashboard with the card; adds a Reply button
Notifications and replies → speech-to-text	none	Adds what was said to notifications and history

One entity per speaker

A physical speaker often has several media players (native Sonos plus Music Assistant, Cast plus Android TV…). Pick one per speaker so messages do not play twice. RoomCall suggests announce-capable native entities and skips Music Assistant mirrors by default.

Rooms come from areas

Each speaker's room is its entity area, or its device area. Speakers without an area only play when you talk to Everywhere — assign them in Settings → Areas.

3. Add the push-to-talk card

The integration registers the card automatically — no dashboard resource needed. Edit a dashboard → Add card → RoomCall, or paste:

type: custom:roomcall-card
title: Intercom
# optional:
room: kitchen                  # where this card is; replies come back here
default_room: basement         # room preselected
rooms: [kitchen, living_room]  # limit the room buttons
people: true                   # person buttons (true, false, or a list of person entities)
history: 3                     # recent calls to show (0 to hide)
layout: default                # default, compact or kiosk

Pick a room or a person Hold to talk Delivered

Hold the button, talk, release. The card plays the chime and then your message in the chosen room, and reports which speakers played it. If your microphone records silence (wrong input selected), the card says so instead of sending an empty clip.

Urgent (top right) plays the next call at the urgent volume and ignores Do Not Disturb and quiet hours.
Bell toggles Do Not Disturb: only urgent calls play while it's on.
People buttons call whoever you tap in the room they're in (see Call a person).
Recent calls can be replayed in the browser, and Reply aims the card back at the caller.

Layouts

Compact Kiosk for a wall tablet Reply mode

compact fits a single row of a dashboard. kiosk is a big button for a wall tablet.

Replies

With phones and a dashboard path set, every call sends a notification such as Kitchen → Basement: "dinner's ready" with a Reply button. Tapping it opens your dashboard with the card already aimed back at the caller's room, so you just hold and talk. The caller's own phones are skipped.

For replies to know where a call came from, set room: on each card (for example the kitchen tablet's card gets room: kitchen).

Why the speaker can't hear your reply

Sonos, HomePod and Nest speaker microphones are reserved for their own voice assistants, so replies come from a phone or tablet. Mic stations next to each speaker are on the roadmap.

AV receivers and TV boxes

Speakers that support announce (Sonos, Google/Nest, HomePod) mix the call over your music. Others — AV receivers through HEOS, Android TV / Google TV boxes such as onn through Cast — have to stop what they're doing to play the call. RoomCall puts them back afterwards:

Before the call	After the call
Receiver on the TV input	Switched back to the TV input, same volume
Receiver off	Turned back off
TV box in Netflix, YouTube…	The same app reopened (where you were in it is up to the app)

RoomCall finds the receiver's input and the box's foreground app through the other media players for the same device model in the same room: the receiver's denonavr entity and the box's Android TV Remote entity. Add both integrations for the best result, and pick the HEOS entity (receiver) or Cast entity (TV box) as the RoomCall speaker.

Receiver plus TV box in one room

If the TV box plays through the receiver, add only the receiver as a speaker. The call then interrupts the sound for a few seconds while the picture keeps going.

Turn this off under Configure → Delivery → Put speakers back after a call.

Do Not Disturb and quiet hours

switch.roomcall_do_not_disturb: while on, normal calls are refused and urgent calls still play. Turn it on in your bedtime routine.
Quiet hours (Configure → Quiet hours): calls play at the quiet volume and skip the rooms you pick (for example the kids' rooms). The card tells you which rooms were skipped.

Call a person

people: [person.alex] in the action, or a person button on the card, plays wherever that person is right now. RoomCall follows the person's device trackers to a room-presence sensor (any sensor.*_area on the same device, as Bermuda creates), or uses a tracker or sensor whose state is an area name. If it can't tell where they are, the call is refused instead of playing in the wrong room.

`roomcall.broadcast` action

Speak a message (text-to-speech) or play an audio URL in rooms or wherever people are:

action: roomcall.broadcast
data:
  areas: [kitchen, basement]   # omit for every RoomCall speaker
  message: Dinner is ready
  volume: 0.4                  # optional, Sonos

action: roomcall.broadcast
data:
  people: [person.alex]
  message: Your ride is here
  priority: urgent             # louder, ignores Do Not Disturb and quiet hours

action: roomcall.broadcast
data:
  areas: garage
  media_url: http://homeassistant.local:8123/local/chime.mp3

With Chime TTS installed, messages get the same chime as push-to-talk. The action returns which speakers played the message, so scripts can react:

- action: roomcall.broadcast
  data: { areas: basement, message: "Laundry is done" }
  response_variable: call
- if: "{{ not call.ok }}"
  then:
    - action: notify.mobile_app_phone
      data: { message: "Basement speaker missed the laundry call" }

Siri, Apple Watch and CarPlay can call this too — see Siri and Shortcuts.

Entities

sensor.roomcall_last_call: time of the last call, with attributes target, from, kind (talk, message, media), priority, delivered, failed, skipped, text, and history (the last 10 calls).
switch.roomcall_do_not_disturb: see above.

How playback works

Recordings are converted to MP3 with Home Assistant's ffmpeg (with the chime in front), kept in memory for two minutes behind an unguessable URL, and handed to each speaker with media_player.play_media, a short moment apart. Speakers that support it get announce: true, so Sonos lowers the music instead of stopping it.

Uploads, history and replays require a signed-in Home Assistant user. Clip and chime URLs are unauthenticated because speakers cannot sign in, which is why clips are random and short-lived. The last 20 calls are kept in memory for 24 hours for replay; they are not written to disk.

Keep the internal URL on plain http

Speakers download clips from Home Assistant's internal URL. If you put Home Assistant behind a reverse proxy with a home-made certificate for the microphone, leave the internal URL on http://<ip>:8123: Sonos and Cast speakers can't trust a home-made certificate.