r/homeassistant

I wanted to share a build, because I still can't quite believe how well it works and how easy Home Assistant made it to put together.

I wanted a voice assistant that could not only control my smart home, but also be conversationally intelligent, have its own personality, and actually sound like a real voice.

I assembled a mic and speaker and connected them via an ESP32 with ESPHome to Home Assistant. The mic picks up what I say out loud in the room. Then in Home Assistant's voice assistant tools, I added a custom wake word and connected the system to ChatGPT to handle my commands, comments, or questions. The tools even allow for the style of the response to be customised to give it a specific flair or personality. The response comes back from the AI and is routed via ElevenLabs to convert the text to speech, which then plays out loud through the device speaker.

The assistant is also exposed to all my smart devices, so it can control them when I ask and it's intelligent enough to read between the lines, so I don't need to specifically command every action. I can say "The kitchen is messy" and it knows to send my robot vacuum to the kitchen, rather than me needing to say "Send the robot vacuum to clean the kitchen".
And because I gave it a sarcastic personality, it'll usually have a dig at me first something like "Oh, the kitchen's messy is it? What a shocker."

I also use automations to trigger the voice assistant rather than always needing to activate it with a wake word. This means it can greet me when I come home unprompted, when my door sensor is activated.

The electronics parts are so cheap and easy to put together that I've got a device in every room for complete coverage.

I filmed the whole build if anyone wants to see it come together: https://youtu.be/p02rbeQ2Oe8

Been involved in this community forever! (over 12 years I think judging by my son's age, my first project was baby monitoring.) I've never taken time to say how awesome I find you all here, every single one. Although I don't fit what seems to be the stereotypical active user from the forums, tech inclined 50+ yo male, I always feel welcome and supported. So many things have changed through the years and seriously I feel old saying it but you never to the scene guys have no idea how much easier it is now and how good you've got it, but I wouldn't trade the learning curve or experience for anything! I can only laugh at what once took maybe days or weeks to figure out comparably being solved in moments. I'm so grateful you're all here to share your knowledge and I never thought I'd find a bond with a community like this. Keep getting excited over tracking those kitty poops or whatever project it is thats getting you excited this week you silly old men, I love you all! 🩷 Xx

Hey friends, I am using a fully local voice assistant set up to control my music library. Most of the time it works great, but there are some band names that it just cannot deal with.

For example, two of my favourite bands are Lagwagon and NOFX (40 year old white guy in the house!), and I have not figured out a way to say that with my slight Cape Breton accent that can be correctly transcribed.

I just set up a script that catches things like “play leg wagon” and “play leg wedding”, which is how whisper interprets me saying that , which works but clearly isn’t ideal. Before I continue down this dark rabbit hole, I was wondering how other folks deal with this.. I am using the small whisper model.

Initially, I tried tying in an AI, with the “process locally first” option enabled, in hopes it would work as a back up, but the extra delay was too much, and my wife was deeply unimpressed.

The SwitchBot Keypad is kind of useless on its own — it only works if you also
buy a SwitchBot Lock, because the keypad just talks to the lock over Bluetooth.
I wanted to use the keypad as a local access controller for Home Assistant
without buying the lock, so I built a workaround.

It's an ESPHome external component that makes a plain ESP32 impersonate a
SwitchBot Lock over BLE. A real keypad pairs to it and sends its normal
encrypted lock/unlock frames; the ESP32 decrypts them and passes them to Home
Assistant as events. The keypad has no idea it isn't talking to a real lock.

The nice part is that every unlock event tells you how it was unlocked (PIN,
fingerprint or face) and which credential slot was used, so you can build
per-user automations — a different notification or action depending on who's
at the door.

Pairing is done through a small web UI hosted on the ESP32 itself: you sign in
to your SwitchBot account, pick the keypad from the list, and it does the BLE
pairing for you. No Python scripts, no laptop, no sniffing. After that it runs
fully local — just BLE and Home Assistant, no cloud. The AES key is generated
on the device and never ends up in your YAML or git.

I've tested it with the Keypad Touch and the Keypad Vision. The original Keypad
and the Vision Pro should work too since they use the same protocols, but I
haven't been able to verify them — would love reports from anyone with those.

Repo with the ESPHome config and setup instructions:
https://github.com/pierluigizagaria/switchbot-keypad-bridge

Voice PE puck set up with two wake words → two Assist pipelines:

- "Hey Jarvis" → Grok EN (Clara voice, EN STT)

- "OK Nabu" → Grok FR (Sylvie voice, FR STT)

Manual commands work great. The pain: inbound notifications via webhooks (SMS / Signal) that call assist_satellite.start_conversation to announce + listen hands-free.

start_conversation uses the puck's currently-active pipeline — i.e., whichever wake word was last used. So if I just talked to "Hey Jarvis", a French SMS arrives and Clara reads it with an English accent, then STT mishears my "oui" as "with"/"play"/etc and Grok gets garbage.

Things I tried that don't work:

- select.select_option on select.X_assistant and _assistant_2 before start_conversation — only rebinds wake-word → pipeline mapping permanently, doesn't override the active

pipeline for the in-flight conversation - Setting preferred_item in /config/.storage/assist_pipeline.pipelines — confirmed via test it does NOT override the satellite's bound pipeline for start_conversation

- No pipeline_entity_id parameter on assist_satellite.start_conversation (afaict)

Current workaround: skip hands-free entirely. Use tts.speak with explicit voice: SylvieNeural / ClaraNeural for the announce (correct voice, no mic open). Then I manually say "OK Nabu, lis mon dernier SMS" to read the body — that works because the wake word puts the puck on the right pipeline.

The question: is there a way to specify which pipeline start_conversation should use per-call? Or another service that opens the mic on a specific pipeline without going through the wake-word flow? Even editing storage to flip the satellite's "active pipeline" between calls would be acceptable.

HA 2026.5 / Voice PE firmware latest / Grok-based conversation agent. Cross-language home, both EN and FR daily.

I've been thinking of scenarios where HA might be used for my Roborock, but I'm not able to find out what HA can do better/automate which I can currently do in its own app. I understand the need of centralising usage, but this is something which I'm not able to fully creative.

I originally got into smart home stuff for the fun side of it, but some devices genuinely ended up changing my day to day habits more than I expected.

Robot vacuums might be the biggest example for me, because I stopped having to constantly think about the floors being dirty.

Curious what devices ended up becoming background infrastructure in your home instead of just a cool gadget.

I've noticed that I rarely see anyone running HA on a Laptop which has a built in UPS, is there reason to prefer PCs?

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a fun project I recently finished. Like many of you with toddlers, my daughter has developed a fascination with standing about two inches away from the TV screen. To protect her eyes and teach her to keep her distance, I decided to automate the parenting.

Whenever she gets too close (< 240cm), the TV automatically pauses. Once she steps back, it resumes. She actually adapted to it immediately and now stays behind the "invisible line" on her own!

Hardware

• Sensor: Hi-Link HLK-LD2410C (24GHz mmWave Radar)
• Board: M5Stack Atom Lite (ESP32)
• Mounted directly under the TV edge (I initially hid it inside my wooden TV cabinet, but the wood density messed with the radar scattering).

The Netflix Hurdle: Everything works perfectly for apps like SmartTube and my local TV provider app, but the official Netflix app actively blocks state updates (playing/paused) via the Android TV integration. I had to build a bypass in Node-RED to ignore Netflix so the flow doesn't get stuck.

Demo & Code:

• YouTube Demo: https://youtu.be/AO_Pd3kCA3k]
• GitHub Repo with ESPHome config & Node-RED export: https://github.com/digira1n-tuxabyte/Homelab/tree/master/home-automation/tv-proximity-sensor (it's in Dutch)

Has anyone else found a reliable workaround for reading the play/pause state of the Netflix app on Android TV?

I’m planning to replace most of my home lighting and I’d really appreciate advice from people with long-term experience using Matter smart bulbs.

Current setup:

• Home Assistant
• MikroTik network (currently Wi-Fi 6, planning to move to a MikroTik hAP be3 with Thread Border Router support)
• Mostly Tapo devices right now (smart power strips/plugs)
• Apartment setup, starting with living room, dining room and hallways first
• Gamer/tech enthusiast, but I care more about reliability and good lighting quality than RGB gimmicks

I’m intentionally excluding Philips Hue because the cost becomes very hard to justify where I live.

Right now I’m mainly comparing:

• Tapo L535E
• Linkind Matter RGBTW bulbs (especially the 1600lm A21)
• Nanoleaf Matter bulbs
• Govee Matter bulbs

Things I care about:

• Good white light quality (important!)
• Consistent color temperature between bulbs
• Efficiency/power consumption
• Low flicker/fatigue
• Matter reliability
• Home Assistant integration
• Long-term ecosystem stability
• Good brightness for common areas
• Preferably local-first behavior

I discovered my current bulbs are generic ones 1055lm 6500K 12W, so the Tapo L535E would basically match my current brightness while using less power.

However, the Linkind 1600lm RGBTW bulbs look VERY tempting because of:

• CRI90
• 1600 lumens
• 1800-6500K
• RGBTW architecture

At the same time, I keep seeing mixed opinions about long-term software/ecosystem maturity compared to TP-Link/Tapo.

One thing I’m struggling with:
Should I keep using Matter over Wi-Fi for bulbs since my network is already good, or should I start investing into Thread/Zigbee for lighting before I scale further?

Some people say Wi-Fi Matter is perfectly fine unless you have huge deployments, while others regret putting dozens/hundreds of Wi-Fi devices on their routers.

Also:
Is mixing bulb brands in connected spaces (living room + dining room + hallways) visually annoying in real life? I’m worried different whites/tints/dimming curves will look inconsistent.

Would love to hear real-world experiences from people running these bulbs long term, especially with Home Assistant.

One thing I’m also trying to understand better:

Linkind explicitly advertises true RGBTW architecture, while Tapo mostly markets the L535E as RGBW + tunable white.

Does anyone know if the Tapo bulbs actually use dedicated warm + cool white channels internally, or are they partially mixing white through RGB?

In real-world usage, does this actually affect:

• white light quality
• color consistency
• CRI perception
• dimming smoothness
• overall comfort

…or is it mostly marketing/spec-sheet differences?

If I look in the activity log for a switch device, it shows a difference between when a switch is turned on manually versus when it’s triggered by an automation. Is it possible to determine this from within another automation?

Has anyone found a way to integrate the Masterbuilt app and grills with HA!