I just bought the Home Assistant Voice PE which works really nicely! However I miss one feature that I used to have with Google Nest, which is the ability to add alarms to wake me up.
I understand that alarms are not supported, but timers can work as an alternative. I could setup a timer a few minutes before bed, but I would have to do it every night which would be difficult to do, so I am looking a way to automate this.
The idea would be to have an automation run 1 hour before a calendar event to ask the device to create a timer in 1 hour.
This way, even if I wake up a few minutes earlier, I could glance at the LED ring and check how much time I have left of sleep.
Can timers be set on the device through automations and if so, which service call is needed to run to accomplish this?
This could work, but I want to retain the Timer features like having the LED ring display the time left, but more importantly I want to be able to stop the timer by saying the “Stop” command.
Really impressed with the VPE so far, but the lack of a chime for timers/alarms makes it a little lack luster. Ideally the chime could be set to a duration and allow the ability to interrupt it with a “stop” command. I imagine this can be fixed with a firmware update in the future, so still a 9 out of 10 device.
In the meantime, will try adding an audio file to HA’s folder and have it play over the VPE, but I don’t imagine the ducking working very well when I try to stop it. But I’ll give it a shot anyway.
I accidentally found a work around that I’m very happy with. Set an announcement with a blank space in the message and enable the pre-announce chime and have it repeat every 9 seconds or so (whatever’s long enough so that you can interrupt it and tell it to stop). I like this better than the native timer’s chime since it doesn’t allow you to interrupt and stop it like this automation does.
