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!
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.
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?
Yes all that is possible.
Once your trigger has occurred you can perform many actions, including text to speech to light control.
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') }}"