Home Assistant's dual wake word support (introduced in 2024.6) is a fantastic feature, particularly for multilingual households. Being able to assign different assistants to different wake words — for example, "Hey Jarvis" for English and "Okay Nabu" for Spanish — opens up genuinely useful persona and language routing at the hardware level.
However, there is currently no entity or event that exposes which wake word triggered a given conversation. The sensor.<device>_last_wake_word entity exists on Voice PE devices but does not update when a wake word fires. The select.<device>_assistant entity only reflects the Assistant 1 configuration, not which wake word was actually used.
The request: Expose the last-fired wake word as a reliably updating sensor entity on Assist satellite devices — something like sensor.<device>_last_wake_word updating to the triggered wake word string on each activation, or alternatively a fired event via the HA event bus.
Why this matters:
The immediate use case is automations that branch on which wake word was used. A practical example: a household with two wake words mapped to English and Spanish pipelines wants to set a language state helper when a conversation starts, enabling dynamic system prompt templating, language-aware meta-automations, or context-aware responses. Right now this is impossible without a workaround.
More broadly, wake word identity is meaningful contextual information — it can indicate who is speaking, which room a command came from if wake words are room-assigned, or which persona is being invoked. Exposing it unlocks a whole class of automations that are currently blocked.
Who this serves: Any multilingual household using dual wake words, anyone using multiple personas mapped to different wake words, and anyone building room-aware voice routing.
Implementation surface: This appears to be a small change — the information already exists internally at the point a wake word fires. Surfacing it as a sensor state or event payload would close the loop on a feature the team clearly intended to be useful for exactly these scenarios.
Thank you for considering it.