Year of the Voice with Mike Hansen

Episode releases 9th July

2023.7

• Services can now respond with data
  When you make a call to turn on a light switch, or call a script there was no way for that call to return data. You would need to store things in input helpers.Now services can return data, which can then be used in your automations. Want a script which returns the events in your calendar today?There is a new calendar list events service, which returns a list of events

  Currently works for Calendar, Conversation and scripts you make.

• New service to speak to the conversation agent
  Responds with what Home Assistant did. For ChatGPT, you can call ChatGPT in an automation, and then push that data to your TTS agent.Thanks Allen Porter for working on all this. He’s even put a Blueprint together that does the chatGPT summary for you.https://gist.github.com/allenporter/e70d9eb090c7dbdd593cf526e07b4abe

• New entity dialog for Locks
  Brings in to line with other entity dialogs like lights that were recently updated
• Open Assist Action
  You can now place a button on your dashboard which will open the Assist Assistant.Great use case for wall mounted tabletsThere are now over 1m Android devices running the Home Assistant app.

• Sentence Trigger
  There is a new sentence trigger available to trigger an automation when a sentence is spoken to an assistant
• Image Entities
  A new type of entity, similar to the camera entity. Instead of a camera feed it will just show the latest image of the sensor. For example, a QR-code that provides the WiFi credentials for your guest network, a weather map, an image of the last motion detected by your camera.Support for this brand new entity has been added to the AVM Fritz!Box Tools, for guest network access, and the MQTT integration and Template integration if you want to build your own.

• Copy and paste support for Dashboards
  You can now cut, copy, and paste cards between your dashboards, views and even inside other nested cards. This makes it a lot easier to reorganize your dashboards!To make it even easier to reorganize your dashboards, it is mandatory to understand the order of the cards across the different columns in your view. So, a positional number is now shown when the your are in edit mode.

• New Script Dialog
  Now the same workflow as automations (create from automation etc)
• Timezone Support
  You can now select which timezone the Home Assistant interface should use in your user profile. This is useful if you are traveling or if you have family members in different timezones.You can select to use the timezone of your current location, or you can choose to use the timezone that your Home Assistant server is in. The Home Assistant frontend will adjust all off the date & times to the selected timezone.

• Unavailable automations and scripts
  If an automation or script has an error, it will now show up as unavailable in the UI. Selecting such an automation will show you the error message, so you know what is going on and what to fix.
• Super fast Bluetooth proxies
  Bluetooth proxies are now even faster! Like… really fast! When using the latest ESPHome and this release of Home Assistant, it will be so much faster that we should actually recommend using over an native Bluetooth stick.ESPHome now sends the raw data from the Bluetooth devices straight to Home Assistant. Should see a 40-80% drop in network communication between the ESP device and Home Assistant.

• HomeKit Controller integration has been renamed to HomeKit Device
  This make it more clear that the integration is to integrate HomeKit devices into Home Assistant.
• The Apple TV integration now supports launching apps with deeplinks!
• The Roborock integration has added cleaning area sensors and switches to control DnD mode

Lock Sensor

PJ emailed us with some feedback about Phil’s idea to use an Aqara Door sensor to detect the state of a lock

hi!I’ve just listened to EP 2023.6 and you’ve mentioned about using Zigbee door sensors with wires for future mission to create door lock sensor – well, here are some tips, as I am using the very same solution 🙂

tip no.1: it appears that Aqara door/window sensors have two additional soldering spots on PCB just on the other side than it’s reed switch

tip no.2: microswitch was small and easy to implement but it is not too durable and after couple of months it just broke so I was replacing it from time to time until I found a better solution: springs. applicable if you have enough space in the frame. I used springs from battery slot from some old toy – springs had a piece of metal attached to it so it was ready to be glued inside door frame

having it configured with proper “lock” domain, I can ask my Google Assistant about locks status and it will tell me which one is locked or unlocked etc. I can also start some automations triggered by locking/unlocking door. I can’t automatically lock them, obviously, but that wasn’t the intention 🙂