Hi all,
I just implemented Snips successfully and want to share 
What is Snips?
Snips is a voice assistant that can run local on a Rapsberry Pi 3 (and maybe other systems). This way Google will never know when you switch your light on 
Fund out more here: http://snips.ai
Snips is also what moved me here from OpenHAB. I never knew about Home Assistant. Then I tried to integrate Snips with OpenHAB and found that most Snips packages in the german store a for a thing called âHome Assistantâ. I thought if there are so many plugins here for this âHome Assistantâ thing, it might be worth to take a look 
Why this guide?
There is a lot of good instructions on the net and even in this forum, however a beginner can easily get confused (at least this was the case for me) or it covers only a part of the setup or is leaving you with very basic instructions on how to create intent scripts that are not very usefull to newbies. Here, I want to show all steps. However, I will often link to other How Tos, the focus of the guide is on the integration between Snips and HA, and have them actually doing stuff for you
The main thing I learned is: Once you understand how the single components work together and how the intent scripts work using Snips is really easy and the quality of the assistant is amazing!
Assumptions & requirements
I am using Home Assistant on Hass.io so some instructions will only work there (like MQTT installation). If you are running on a different installation, these steps might be different for you.
My Hassi.io Home Assistant runs on a Raspberry Pi 4, 4GB (doesnât really matter if you run on another one here I think).
I tried to install Snips on a Pi 4 before but failed. Debian Buster has some missing dependencies and Debian Stretch wonât run on a Pi 4. Then I tried to install Hass.io on that second Pi 4 and Snips as an addon, but that brought me many errors, too. I then bought a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ to run Snips
So far I implemented the control of Covers and Hue Scenes in some rooms. That is quite incomplete regarding variety of intents but it is working and you will find everything to go on by yourself.
As a microphone I use a Playstation Eye USB camera. You can get them very cheap on eBay and they do a good job, out of the box, without additional drivers.
For sound feedback you will need a 3,5" speaker, I am using a headphone right now.
Preparations
We will need a MQTT server. HA has an integrated one and Snips also, but I wanted to do it right and install a separated one on my hass.io:
1) Create a user in Home Assistant, called mqtt_login.
2) Go to the Hass.io Addons and install and start MQTT.
3) Add the following to your configuration.yaml:
mqtt:
broker: localhost
port: 1883
username: <mqtt user>
password: <mqtt password>
snips:
and restart Home Assistant.
(I think thats not the right place for passwords, something I have to learn about how to fix that).
4) Install Stretch and Snips on the Raspberry 3. There are good guides on the Snips website, however one of them is the manual installation, the other one is the nice SAM way but misses instructions to install npm. I took that from another HowTo, where somebody integrated Snips with OpenHab2. If you prefer a german guide, you can follow this guide until the installation of Snips is finished (stop before installing the assistant).
For english instructions: Follow this guide until Stretch is installed, then install npm and node.js with
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
and then continue with Step 3 of the guide.
Note: I installed npm on the raspberry (as in the previous steps) and used it from there, therefore ignored that sentence in the guide: âFor the remainder of this guide, all commands are run from your computer, not on the Raspberry Pi.â
Donât forget to plug in your USB microphone and a 3,5" speaker or headphone to the Pi 3
If you followed the english guide you might find these commands from the german one useful for setting up your audio devices (but the Playstation Eye and a 3,5" might work right away without those steps):
sam setup audio
sam test speaker
sam test microphone
5) Enable Snips to use an external MQTT broker (the one we installed on Hass.io):
edit /etc/snips.toml on the Snips Raspberry
uncomment the mqtt host and port as well as the username and password section and enter your username and password.
Here my mqtt config:
[snips-common]
bus = "mqtt"
mqtt = "<mqtt-host>:1883"
# audio = ["+@mqtt"]
# assistant = "/usr/share/snips/assistant"
# user_dir = "/var/lib/snips"
## MQTT authentication
mqtt_username = "<login>"
mqtt_password = "<password>"
6) Create an app and assistant
Now in most tutorials there comes a step where you install the assistant. This is where my problems started. They mostly want to install some package from the store. But that might not be available in your language or not at all anymore and then you are lost with the examples that follow.
I learned that this is absolutely unnecessary. The prepackaged stuff might be useful for more complex things but to control Home Assistant you can better create your own app, so you will also know the intents without having to learn about them and you will learn a lot about Snips. Plus I found it somewhat odd that the existing Apps had some stuff that asked me for the Hass host, a token, a dictionary etc. I donât know why beause I get the intents perfectly through MQTT and can work with them without such stuff. It is also better to create your own app as you can make the slots fitting to what your own scripts expect instead of fitting your scripts to someone elseâs appâŠ
So we are going to create our own app, intents and assistant now:
-
If not done yet, go to http://snips.ai and create yourself an account for the Console.
-
Create a new assistant, give it a name and select your language.
-
Click âAdd an Appâ and âCreate new Appâ.
-
Enter a name and click âCreateâ
-
As a start, I created intents to open covers (OeffneRolladen), close covers (SchliesseRolladen) and select a hue scene (AktiviereSzene). We will later use very flexbile intent scripts to deal with them.
I will later publish my very basic app to the store for reference. For now screenshots should work:
As you can see I typed three sample sentences (more are better!) and created a Slot whichCover of type default. I then marked the word I expect to end up in the âwhichCoverâ slot in the end and selected whichCover accordingly. This is very flexible - you can give Snips on sample sentence with the kitchen, one with the living room and the first one will work with âliving roomâ, too. Snips is somewhat intelligent here.
Donât forget to click save!
NOTICE I currently have a problem with german characters like Ă€ ö ĂŒ - Kitchen is âKĂŒcheâ in german and it seems that Home Assistant will not accept the ĂŒ in the slot value. When I change to a word without ĂŒ, it instantly works again, however Snips is always passing KĂŒche as KĂŒche and never as Kueche. Will work that out laterâŠ
I did the same to open covers:
(it is possible to put open and close in one when altering the scripts we create later, this might happen in a later optimization step, for now itâs sufficient).
And I created one more to activate Hue scenes, this time with two slots:
All the intents:
The assistant:
Update on slot type When adding your slots for rooms (or scenes maybe), just create a custom slot type (i.e. âroomsâ). There you can enter all your rooms including synonyms. Now you donât need to create example sentences for each room as Snips can understand all the rooms in your custom slot. Plus you can reuse this custom slot in the Hue Scenes script (where a group is mostly a roomor area) or any other intent that requires room names.
7) Install your assistant to snips. This is very easy:
Click deploy assistant in the Snips console, copy the SAM command it tells you in the Popup and run that on your Snips raspberry. It should do some ASR training and download the agent.
You can now enter
sam watch
And then you can already say âHey Snipsâ. You should hear a pling plong sound and then you should be able to speak a command. It should be one of your example sentences. However, Snips is very good in detecting your intention and you can speak very natural, it will most likely still fit. If not, just add some more example sentences to the intent.
You should now see Snips analyzing your sentence, identifying the intent and populating the slot. Nothing will hapen of course as Home Assistant does not know what to do with it. We will change that in the next step.
8) Create intent scipts. I did this in a separate file. Here you can easily see, how the Snips intents and slots are used in Home Assistant.
Credits: These scripts where inspired by this guys post on the Snips forum: https://forum.snips.ai/t/integrating-snips-with-home-assistant/211/3
configuration.yaml:
intent_script: !include intent_scripts.yaml
intent_scripts.yaml:
SchliesseRolladen:
speech:
type: plain
text: 'OK, {{ whichCover }} Rolladen werden geschlossen.'
action:
- service_template: cover.close_cover
data_template:
entity_id: cover.{{ whichCover }}
OeffneRolladen:
speech:
type: plain
text: 'OK, {{ whichCover }} Rolladen werden geoeffnet.'
action:
- service_template: cover.open_cover
data_template:
entity_id: cover.{{ whichCover }}
AktiviereSzene:
speech:
type: plain
text: 'OK Szene {{ whichScene }} wird aktiviert.'
action:
- service: hue.hue_activate_scene
data_template:
group_name: '{{ whichGroup }}'
scene_name: '{{ whichScene }}'
I don#t wanted all the ifs and elifs in that code and make that easier. To make this working with the covers, we have to do a little trick with groups (attention: this is not going to groups.yaml but configuration.yaml, of course you could move it to another file):
configuration.yaml:
cover:
- platform: group
name: 'Schlafzimmer'
entities:
- cover.oeq....
- cover.oeq....
- platform: group
name: 'Wohnzimmer'
entities:
- cover.oeq.....
- cover.oeq.....
- cover.oeq....
As you can see, I simply give the group the name I expect to be passed in the slot from Snips. That way we can just append the slot in the intent script and there is no need to write a single script for each cover. You can also create such a group for a single cover and call it i.e. âWohnzimmerfensterâ (âliving room windowâ) and then add that word to the rooms custom slot (so in this case we misuse the cover group as an alias). Be aware of upper/lower case when working with intents and slots!
For the Hue Scene activation, you can request Snips to activate any scene thats available in a room by submitting the room name and scene name through a voice command. However, you canât switch the lights off like this as there is no âOffâ or âAusâ scene. That can be created using the CLIP tool on your bridge. How to do that is described here:
Also scroll down and read my stupid questions, that got nicely answered by Mariusthvdb to avoid making the same mistakes than me!
Thats it! After restarting Home Assistant, everything should work now. I hope with the scripts and Snips app creation included, this guide covers some gaps I experienced when trying to understand how all this works together.
Of course I will add the missing codes and configs later and publish the Snips app after I put some more stuff in there.
I am also currently installing mimic TTS as the original one is not that fancy. Will report back about that, too.
Also on my list: Make myself familiar with slot types and custom slots, seems that they are able to reduce the number of necessary example sentences and words when used right.
Updated that topic in the Snips assistant part.
Have fun and let me know for any problems, questions or improvements
Edit: As this is currently growing very fast, I plan to publish my HA App and the corresponding intent_scripts soon⊠maybe in a week or two. German users will than only need to create their own groups that fit the names or edit it slightly.
