Roav VIVA and Satellite Radio or FM Radio

Has anyone figured out a way to have Alexa play over the speakers while listening to satellite radio or FM radio? With the VIVA, you’re basically limited to only playing bluetooth music if you want to hear Alexa. If we are listening to Sirius XM, the VIVA will respond, but we obviously can’t hear it because it plays it over the bluetooth source. I know it’s possible to play bluetooth sounds over other sources because google maps will still give turn by turn directions while using satellite radio or the FM radio. How does it do that? By using the “Play as bluetooth phone call” option. This uses the bluetooth HFP “hands free profile” to route audio as a phone call and automatically cut your music. If this could be incorporated into the VIVA that would be great. We don’t use ours at all because we never listen to bluetooth music. We always listen to satellite radio or FM radio. Now one option would be to just switch to streaming all of our music, but we have limited data plans so that’s a no go.

This link shows how to enable this feature in google maps with an iphone:

And there is an app called AudioBT that would likely work for Android phones by rerouting all sounds through the Hands Free Profile, but I’m clueless when it comes to an iPhone solution.

Has anyone ran into this problem and come up with a solution for it? I’ve used the VIVA probably 5 times since I bought it in May, and I’m regretting my purchase because I can’t even really use it like I thought I’d be able to. Pretty disappointed.

Edit: And I believe that when audio is routed through HFP instead of A2DP, there is a loss in quality of the audio. Because of that, it would be nice if only the Alexa responses came through the HFP channel, and all other audio would still be sent through A2DP.

I also have and use SXM. Instead of dropping over to “media”, most of the time I send commands “in the dark” to the VIVA, hoping to see the rings blink in confirmation. Works well enough to activate/deactivate home systems when needed, but that’s about all I get out of it. If I could get audio without having to switch to “media”, the VIVA would actually be a useful device that I couldn’t just mimic more efficiently by leaving the Alexa App on my phone while in its cradle. I’ll investigate the app you mentioned - I use an Android phone so maybe there’s hope?

Thanks,

+1 for implementing the Viva App with the “hands free profile”, at least as an option within the setup.
Currently I’m also using the AudioBT app with Android to fix this design flaw, but this app drains the battery a bit more than expected, so a direct support in the viva app would be really nice…