I was sick of using Alexa in my smart home, so I decided to replace her with Assist, the local voice assistant in Home Assistant. At first, the experience wasn’t great and I’d often have to repeat myself, but by making a few simple changes the experience improved dramatically.
Exposing fewer entities
Don’t make your voice assistant work harder than it needs to
Whenever you add a device to Home Assistant, it can generate multiple entities. This means that as you build your smart home, the number of entities can quickly grow very large. If every one of these entities is exposed to Assist, it means that when you give a voice command, the software will have to try to find a match among a huge list.
You can significantly improve the quality and speed of responses by only exposing the entities that you actually need to control. Go to Settings > Voice assistants, and click X entities exposed below the list of voice assistants. To remove an exposed entity, click the X at the end of the row, or click Expose entities to choose more entities to expose.
You can also change exposure within the settings for any specific entity. Click Voice assistants and toggle Expose on and off. If you expose an entity, make sure that Assist is toggled on.
- Brand
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Seeed Studio
- CPU
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ESP32-S3R8
The reSpeaker Lite Voice Assistant Kit includes a two-mic array, a pre-soldered XIAO ESP32-S3 controller, and an XMOS XU316 audio processor with onboard natural language understanding, interference cancellation, acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression, and automatic gain control. Hooked up a 5W speaker, you can create your own local voice assistant that you can connect to Home Assistant via ESPHome.
Using clear and simple names
Make things easier for you and your voice assistant
When you add devices to Home Assistant, it can often generate the names of devices or entities for you. If you stick to using these names, you often end up with entities with names such as 5E266QT35, which is hard for you to remember and hard for Assist to understand.
Giving your entities clear and simple names makes life much easier. You don’t have to worry about renaming every entity in your smart home; just change the entities that you’re exposing.
Using aliases
You don’t need to remember the exact name
Even with a clear naming convention, it can often be hard to remember the exact name of the device you want to control. If you keep having to try different variations of the name before you find one that works, then aliases can help.
You can add multiple aliases to an entity, and Assist should respond when you say either the actual name of the entity or any of the listed aliases. The simpler you make these aliases, the better.
Using custom sentences
Say the same thing in multiple ways
Just as you can add multiple different names to entities, you can also set up multiple different ways of saying commands. If the way you naturally phrase a command doesn’t match one of the predefined sentences for Assist, the command may not work. You can add your own custom sentences to use the exact phrasing that you want.
If you have multiple people in your home, you may find that everyone phrases commands slightly differently. You can set up multiple custom sentences that cover all these variations and link them to the same intent.
Defining areas
Room-aware satellites make life easier
Home Assistant allows you to assign devices to different areas of your home. This can make using your voice assistant much easier.
If you have a smart speaker assigned to the living room, for example, and all your living room lights assigned to the same area, you don’t need to say “turn off the living room lights” to get them to turn off. Just saying “turn off the lights” should be enough for Assist to figure out that it needs to turn off the lights within that room.
Use a better wake word
Some may work better than others
By default, Assist offers several wake words, including Okay Nabu, Hey Jarvis, and Hey Mycroft. In my experience, I’ve found that Okay Nabu seems to work more reliably than some of the others.
If you’re struggling to get Assist to detect the wake word, it’s worth trying one of the others. Depending on your accent and language, you may find that some of the wake words are more accurate than the others.
Placing smart speakers more carefully
Don’t get drowned out by noise
Depending on the hardware you’re using, you may find that your voice assistant struggles to hear you over background noise. This means that you end up shouting the wake word over and over again before you can make yourself heard.
You can reduce this problem by thinking about the best location for your smart speaker. You want to place it reasonably close to where you’re most likely to be issuing voice commands. You also want to ensure that it’s not too close to devices that might drown out your voice, such as your TV or audio devices.
Simple changes can transform Assist
When you first set up Assist, you may find yourself constantly having to repeat the wake word or commands. With the right setup, however, you should be able to improve things significantly.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
