RECOMMENDATIONS? Smart Speaker Network with best Plex Integration?

Plex Players
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What 2022 networked smart home speakers have the best Plex intergration? Asking because new ones are always coming out, and Plex is always evolving, and technology is always changing.

We have the original Google Home Mini speakers, and their response is getting worse and worse. I’m fed up with Google Assistant’s poor responsiveness (I have to repeat myself 3 times now to get them to give a lucid response; when I first bought them they were much more responsive). Plus, there seems to be no direct voice-activated Plex integration (to play items from my music library). And now that Google’s upload-your-own-music service moved over to YouTube music, when I ask it to play a song or artist from my music library, it fails at that task at least 9 times out of 10. But at least the Google Home Minis (sometimes) show up as devices to cast to from the Plexamp and Plex iphone app. I also like how I can create groups of speakers and cast to them at the same time, playing music throughout the house.

I was thinking of replacing my Google speaker ecosystem with Amazon Echo (Alexa) devices. But the Plexamp and Plex iphone app doesn’t currently see my Alexa-enabled Ecobee (thermostat) as a device I can cast to, so would that be the same for Echos? Maybe Ecobee’s Alexa implementation is limited? If anyone knows if Plexamp and Plex can cast directly to Echo (Alexa) devices, please let me know.

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It saddens me to say this but Plex, when deployed on stereo paired Alexa devices, sucks and it sucks hard. I am convinced that there is some sort of internal race condition in the code’s implementation that results in the application silently failing most of the time.

Currently, of the 3 different generations of Alexa devices I own, I can not routinely get Plex to play on them. It does seem that the 4th gen Alexa has the best “chance” of actually playing music, but even when it does start streaming audio it is hit or miss if it will make it past one song. . The general pattern is I ask Alexa to ask Plex to play (fill in the blank) and Alexa responds as if it is going to start doing precisely that… and then nothing further happens.

You can power cycle everything, delete the app, reinstall the app, and it might work for a while but that gets old real quick.