Managing your home network can often be a frustrating and time-consuming process. Depending on your hardware, you can use Home Assistant to expose many of your router’s most useful features. You can then use a smart speaker to manage your home network using just your voice.
Managing your local network can be frustrating
Home Assistant can make life easier
Generic ISP routers are often incredibly annoying. In order to access the most useful features you often have to wade through a mess of menus on the web admin interface or deal with a clunky proprietary app. It can take far longer than it should to perform a simple action such as turning on the guest Wi-Fi network.
Home Assistant can make things much easier. There are integrations for many popular router brands, although support for ISP-supplied routers is more limited. When your router is supported, Home Assistant can expose its controls so that you can manage it without having to use the router’s app or web interface.
Even better, you can expose the controls in Home Assistant to a smart speaker. You can use Alexa or Home Assistant’s own Assist voice assistant to control your network with spoken commands.
- Brand
-
eero
- Wi-Fi Bands
-
Dual-band Wi-Fi 7
Amazon’s Eero 7 router offers high-speed Wi-Fi 7 connectivity with up to 1.8 Gb wireless throughput and a 2,000 square foot range. It also features two 2.5 GbE ports, though it notably lacks 6GHz connectivity, which is unusual for a Wi-Fi 7 router.
What I can do on my network with a smart speaker
I control a lot of network settings without touching an app or UI
I’m not a big fan of generic ISP routers. They’re usually fairly basic and often have a very clunky web UI that makes them annoying to use for managing your home network. However, my ISP was offering me a Wi-Fi 7 router and when I looked at the offer it somehow turned out to reduce my monthly bill, so it was too good to refuse.
The router has a Home Assistant integration which offers some basic network functionality that I can control with my voice. I can use commands such as:
- Is the Wi-Fi up?
- How many guest devices are connected to Wi-Fi?
- Turn on the guest network
- Restart the router
- How long has the router been up?
- What’s my download speed?
I also have some Eero mesh nodes that I use to extend the range of the Wi-Fi network. Using the Eero integration in Home Assistant, I can use additional voice commands such as the following:
- Turn off band steering
- Run a speed test
- Reboot the study Eero
- Turn off the bedroom Eero’s light
- How many devices are connected to the living room eero?
With a little tweaking of the exposed entities and the friendly names of the relevant buttons, switches in Home Assistant, I was able to get these commands to work using just my voice.
What I could unlock with my current hardware
Using bridge mode loses some functionality
I’m currently using my Eero mesh nodes in bridge mode. This means that assigning IP addresses to devices on my network is all handled by my ISP router rather than the Eero system. If I were to just use my Eero mesh, there are even more things I should be able to do using my smart speaker, with commands such as the following:
- Pause the kids’ Wi-Fi
- How much data has the kids’ profile used today?
- Resume Alan’s profile
- Block TikTok on Alan’s profile
- Turn on content filtering for the kids’ profile
- What’s using the most bandwidth right now?
- Turn off ad blocking
Some of these features require an Eero Plus subscription. These include ad blocking, content filters, and app blocking, which are not available without Eero Plus.
Other router integrations can do even more
Depending on your hardware, you may have even more control
This is just an example of what is possible with my ISP router and Eero mesh. Depending on the hardware you use on your own home network, you may be able to do even more.
For example, the Eero integration only allows you to control entire profiles of connected devices. With the UniFi integration, you can control each individual device, allowing you to turn off any device by name.
If you’re using PoE through a UniFi switch, you can use your voice to cut or restore power to a specific device. If you’ve set up restrictions such as throttling a set of devices when you’re streaming, you can enable or disable that restriction by voice.
The exact things you’ll be able to control by voice for your own home network will depend on the router or mesh that you’re using, and what the Home Assistant integration for that hardware can support. It’s worth taking a look to see what your router can expose to Home Assistant, as it could save you from having to wade through web interface menus or proprietary apps.
You don’t have to rely on your voice
While voice commands are a quick and easy way to manage your home network, they’re not the only option. Anything that’s exposed as a controllable entity in Home Assistant can also be managed in other ways; you might prefer to create a dashboard that you can use to make changes to your network settings.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
