What is it?
A per-user reminder list. Reminder items can be added via automations or assist intents, and a reminder due notification event will trigger when the reminder time has come.
Why Did I build it?
My family has been using Slack reminders for a while. But for a variety of reasons, that’s going away. I depend on it for a lot of what I plan my week - simple recurring reminders for vitamins, garbage, or to do go to the bank on my way home from work today.
Anyway, I’ve gotten quite used to the phrase “remind me at 6pm to switch the laundry” and the like. And the existing home assistant todo integration does 90% of what I want, except for the fact that I want to put anything I think of in it. That might include getting birthday presents or other things I don’t want everyone to see when they load the todo panel. So, I build a little reminder integration. It’s a little hackish - you can only list the actual reminder items with a service, so that the user context in home assistant can show different reminders to different people, essentially keeping them private. Though, I do also understand that probably doesn’t mean actually protected.
Basically I wanted the following:
- Per-user reminder lists: Each Home Assistant user automatically gets their own reminder entity. If user_a queries the list of user_b, they will get no events back. All that is public is the number of reminders per user list.
- Events for automation: A background scheduler checks reminders every 30 seconds and fires events when reminders are due
- Intents: Intents plus a custom_sentences example handle a fair variety of ways of adding reminders.
I was going to write a tiny back-end service in the vein of remember the milk, but I didn’t want to manage yet another login/app/etc for everyone in the famiy, and it seemed pretty easy to just use the home assistant’s store instead of an external one, so things just fell into place. I wanted to initially actually make them in the TODO domain, but the service doesn’t pass the user information to the entities, so it ended up having to be in a custom domain.
Where is it?
If you made it this far, the repo is here: https://github.com/qedi-r/user-reminders. It’s set up to be HACS installable, though I never felt the need to submit it to the HACS repo.
If you have feedback, let me know!