Title: I built an AI voice assistant that sets up Home Assistant automations for you — free beta
I'm a truck accessory installer and solar tech, and I kept hitting the same wall with friends: they'd hear about Home Assistant, get excited, install it, then bounce off the YAML and the automation editor within a week. The gap between "normal person" and "HA power user" is huge, and it shouldn't be.
So I built HouseAssist. You connect your HA instance once, then just describe what you want — typed or by voice:
- "Turn my garage lights on when I get home after sunset"
- "Build me a dashboard for my solar setup"
- "Notify me if the sump pump sensor goes offline"
It reads your actual entities from your instance, so it uses your real device names instead of guessing placeholders. Automations deploy directly to your HA and are live immediately. Dashboards come back as ready-to-paste YAML with instructions. There's a hands-free voice mode where it talks back and keeps listening, which is handy when you're on a ladder holding a motion sensor.
What you need: a Home Assistant instance reachable from the internet (Nabu Casa remote URL, DuckDNS, reverse proxy — whatever you've got) and a long-lived access token.
What it costs: nothing right now. It's a free beta while I find the rough edges. Eventually it'll be a cheap subscription, and beta testers will get a locked-in founder's rate if they want to stay.
On security, since you'll ask: your HA token is encrypted at rest, sign-up is just email and password, no data selling, no ads.
It's at houseassist.app.
I built this solo over a holiday weekend (with one hand in a bandage, but that's another story), so there will be bugs. That's why I'm here — tell me what breaks, what's confusing, and what's missing. Blunt feedback preferred.