The Problem
With the integration of Voice Assistants and LLM agents, when a user gives a generic command like “Turn on the light in the Kitchen”, the agent resolves the intent by calling the HassTurnOn tool and passing the Area ID.
Currently, when an Area is targeted, Home Assistant indiscriminately turns on all entities within the light domain in that Area. This means that along with the main ceiling light, all secondary lights (LED strips, accent lights, backlights, cabinet lights) are also turned on.
This forces users to either unexpose secondary lights from the voice assistant or create complex scripts, breaking the natural grouping of the Area.
Proposed Solution
Introduce a “Primary Light” boolean flag (or a “Default for Area” toggle) in the Voice Assistants/Entity settings for the light domain.
When a generic turn-on command targets an Area, the system should check if any light in that Area has the “Primary” flag enabled.
- If yes: Only the flagged light(s) are turned on.
- If no: The system defaults to the current behavior (turns on all lights in the Area).
Conversely, a generic “turn off the lights” command should still turn off everything in the Area.
Alternatives Considered
- Helper Groups: Creating a group for main lights and exposing only that. Downside: It requires heavy manual maintenance and duplicates entities.
- Unexposing LEDs: Hiding secondary lights from Assist. Downside: The user loses the ability to control those specific secondary lights via voice entirely.
- Prompt Engineering: Asking the LLM to filter entity names. Downside: It’s highly unreliable and prone to parsing errors or API timeouts.
Having a native flag would vastly improve the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) and the out-of-the-box voice assistant experience.