I’ve been a long-time fan of Google Home, but there’s always been this one pesky issue that drove me crazy—the annoying “BWOMPT” sound whenever I cast a TTS or audio file. I understand it’s a safety feature, but it was so disruptive! I decided to take matters into my own hands and figure out a way to disable it without waiting for Google to fix it.
After some research and experimentation, I discovered that the prompt only plays when the device is in an “Idle” state. So, I needed a way to keep the Google Home from turning off after periods of inactivity. My first thought was to create an automation that periodically turns the device on, but that didn’t work as expected—it just toggled the state instead of keeping it active.
Then I had an epiphany: what if I played a silent MP3 file at regular intervals? I found a 1-second silent MP3 online and set up an automation to play it every 2 minutes. The result? Perfect! The Google Home stays active, and the prompt sound is completely eliminated. I even added a condition to ensure it doesn’t interrupt anything already playing.
Here’s the automation I came up with:
yaml
- alias: Keep Google Home Alive
trigger:
platform: time
minutes: ‘/2’
condition:
condition: or
conditions:
- condition: state
entity_id: media_player.bedroom_home
state: ‘off’
- condition: state
entity_id: media_player.bedroom_home
state: ‘idle’
action:
service: media_player.play_media
entity_id: media_player.bedroom_home
data:
media_content_id: https://hassio.local:8123/local/1sec.mp3
media_content_type: music
This setup has been running flawlessly for me, and I haven’t heard the dreaded prompt sound since! I’d love to hear if others have found success with similar solutions or if there’s a more efficient way to achieve this. Maybe one day Google will integrate this kind of fix into their system, but until then, this hack has been a lifesaver for me.
If you’re looking to implement something similar, I’d recommend testing with a single device first to ensure everything works as expected before scaling it up. Happy automating!