xAI TTS Integration for Home Assistant Built with Claude — Full Repo
A developer on r/ClaudeAI worked with Claude to build a custom xAI TTS integration for Home Assistant. The integration uses xAI's new Eve voice and supports all five xAI voices (Eve, Ara, Rex, Sal, Leo), plus expressive speech tags like [pause], [laugh], <emphasis>, <slow>, etc.
The main technical hurdle: HA's modern TTS platform requires the async_stream_tts_audio method returning a TTSAudioResponse — the older async_get_tts_audio path silently fails in voice pipelines. This detail is not well documented and took time to debug.
At $15/1M characters, Eve is priced identically to OpenAI and reportedly more expressive for longer content than OpenAI's Ballad voice.
The repo is available at github.com/therealakahn/ha-xai-tts. The author states no HACS support is planned; it's provided as-is.
📖 Read the full source: r/ClaudeAI
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