Action / condition scope

Configuration
1

I think Home Assist may be what I am looking for, which is a combination of home automation and the ability to respond with voice when it hears sentences that I will configure. So for example my wife (who has a form of dementia) may say “What day is it?” or “What am I doing today?” and rather than triggering a physical service I want to be able to trigger an answer like “today is Friday” or “your grandson is visiting you this morning at 10 oclock”.
A have a resonable knowledge of python, if that helps. Appreciate any comments on whether Home Automation can support this kind of voice only service as well as turning on the lights!

2

Yes you can do that with sentence triggers, see: Automation Trigger - Home Assistant

However home assistant’s voice control does not have a wake word (like “Alexa” or “Hey Google”) yet and so currently requires activation manually by pressing a physical or dashboard button. This functionality is planned for in the coming months.

3

Thanks for the response. However the link that you sent refers to triggers, but my concern is about the permisseable actions in response to a trigger. In some cases I want the option to have an action that allows me to send a text message to the TTS engine, resulting in a speech response from the Home Assistant rather than triggering a physical switch etc. I don’t see anthing the Actions section that tells me I can do that - is it possble?

4

Yes all that is possible.

Once your trigger has occurred you can perform many actions, including text to speech to light control.

5
6

For example:

automation:
  trigger:
    - platform: conversation
      command:
        - "what day is it"
  action:
    - service: : tts.speak
      target: tts.example
      data:
        media_player_entity_id: media_player.kitchen
        message: "it is {{ now().strftime('%A') }}"