If you’re tired of closed-source smart home ecosystems like Alexa and Google Home, then Home Assistant can give you far more freedom. If you miss voice commands, you can use the native Assist voice assistant in Home Assistant. While hooking it up to an LLM can give Assist natural language understanding, there’s a lot more you can do with the default version of Assist than you might think.

Set and change timers

Set, name, stack, and adjust timers with your voice

Credit: Joe Fedewa / How-To Geek

Setting timers with my voice was one of the few genuinely useful ways that I used to use Alexa. When I was cooking, being able to set a ten-minute timer without having to touch anything with hands covered in raw meat was a real help.

With Assist, you can do exactly the same thing. The simple voice commands, such as “set a timer for five minutes,” are fairly obvious, but there’s a lot more you can do. For example, you can add a name to your timers by saying something like “set a ten-minute timer for pasta,” and then refer to different timers by name by saying things such as “cancel pasta timer.”

You can also modify your timers while they’re running, with commands such as “add five minutes to my pasta timer,” or “remove two minutes from timer.” If you want to know how long is left, asking “how much time is left on pasta timer” should return the information.

Dimensions

84x84x21 mm

Weight

96 g

Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition is a privacy-first smart speaker built as an alternative to the likes of Amazon Alexa and Google Nest Mini. It adds voice assistant capabilities, including local-only processing, to a Home Assistant-powered smart home. 

Tell your home to do something later

Delayed commands are distinct from timers

Credit: 

Ben Lovejoy / How-To Geek

Timers aren’t the only way that you can use time-based commands with Assist. One of the most useful features is the ability to give delayed commands.

For example, you can say “turn off the lights in the bedroom in ten minutes,” and the lights won’t immediately turn off. Instead, they will remain on for ten minutes and only turn off when the requested time has elapsed.

This is really useful when you don’t want things to happen immediately, but don’t want to have to issue a voice command later on. For example, you can start some relaxing music playing through your smart speakers when you go to bed and say to Assist, “pause bedroom music in thirty minutes,” and you can fall asleep knowing that the music won’t keep playing all night.

There is one small issue with using these types of commands. Unlike with timers, it’s not possible to cancel or modify the delayed commands once they’re running. If you’ve asked Assist to pause the music in thirty minutes, it will happen whether you like it or not.

Use area-aware commands

Assist may know which room you’re in

Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek

One of the problems with using voice commands with Assist is that the commands can become quite lengthy if you have a lot of information you need to get across. For example, saying “change living room lights brightness to 50%” can feel like a bit of a mouthful.

The good news is that you don’t always need to say quite as much. If you’re trying to control a device that’s in the same room, you don’t need to mention the room at all. As long as both the smart speaker you’re talking to and the device you want to control have been assigned to the same area in Home Assistant, if you leave out the area name, Assist will assume you mean the devices in the same area as the smart speaker that you’re currently talking to.

For example, I can say “turn off the lights” to the smart speaker in my home office, and only the lights in my office will turn off, with the lights in the rest of the house remaining unchanged. If I use the same command with a speaker in a different room, it will turn off the lights in that room instead.

Add items to lists

Create a shopping list with your voice

Another useful thing you can do with Assist is add items to Home Assistant lists. Home Assistant includes native to-do lists, which are fairly simplistic, but can be very useful. Using Assist, you can use voice commands to add items to these lists.

A simple command such as “add milk to my shopping list” will create a new entry on the shopping list. If you set up your own custom lists, you’ll need to expose them to Assist. You can then say things such as “add mow the lawn to my weekend chores list” to have a new to-do item created in the appropriate list.

Cancel mistaken commands

Tell Assist your favorite Nirvana album

Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek

One of the most useful commands for Assist is “Nevermind.” You can use this command to stop Home Assistant from listening if you triggered the wake word by mistake.

If you do trigger Assist by accident, it will often get confused when you try to tell it to stop speaking and will continue to try to reply to whatever you say. By saying “Nevermind,” Assist will stop and leave you in peace.

Assist has some useful features out of the box

You can make Assist more suited to your needs by creating your own custom sentences and intents, or by hooking it up to an LLM. However, even using the default commands, there’s a lot you can do.