In most of my rooms I have a ceiling light and several lamps or led strips etc, does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to deal with this naturally via voice assist?
Imagine a room - ‘The Living Room’ with two ceiling lights, one over the main living area and a second over a rarely used side of the room. The room also has a table lamp and a floor lamp. All of the lights are smart and connected to HA.
Currently I use LLM (Gemma 4) for voice assist and if I ask ‘turn on / off the light’ it controls every light in the room, what I’d like is that ‘light’ simply controls the main living area ceiling light.
Having to say the entity name for the ‘main’ light in each room feels un-natural, so I wondered if anyone has come up with a way to designate a ‘main’ light for a room that responds to generic ‘light’ requests, and them lamps / leds are controlled directly via their entity name or alias.
I guess a halfway house could be to alias ‘Living Room Light’, ‘Bedroom Light’ etc.. to the main light for each room but again saying that doesn’t feel natural.. the assistant already knows what room I’m in, so I shouldn’t need to say the room name.
so I wondered if anyone has come up with a way to designate a ‘main’ light for a room that responds to generic ‘light’ requests, and them lamps / leds are controlled directly via their entity name or alias.
Lables
You can use them to create simple voice automation as well as define rules for LLMs.
Similarly I have shades in three rooms, each room has south facing and west facing shades, as well as upper/lower shades (think mostly glass). About 30 shades in all. While I did name them like livingroom_west_lower_1, I just use labels marking them in south or west, upper or lower. Then script to use this info to close all uppers, or set west lower dining to 50%, …
I have a similar situation. In our Family Room, there is a fireplace and we have ceiling lights for that area. But we want to control them separately. So, I have a Family Room area and a Fireplace area. The voice assistant is in the family room. Asking to turn on the lights, turns on all the lights but not the fireplace ones. The family seems ok saying Turn on the Fireplace to use those lights.
We use Google Voice Assistants. So, you have to say something like: Hey Google, turn on the fireplace.
I have a Voice Preview Edition and it seems good. But I am not ready to turn everything over to them, yet. Part is just the cost of replacing every device. Part is my family uses the Google devices for more than controlling lights. I am not sure they would be accepted, yet. TMI, I know.
And when you’re ready to get stupid and go completely overboard… This is what happened when I started solving the same problem a couple years ago. Funny enough the release yesterday is very relevant. How do I handle lights.
Short version the house s does it on its own and the agent (also Gemma btw…) sets up the exceptions.
I ended up solving this not using labels as it didn’t look like a label could be used as part of the hassTurnon intent. So I set a voice alias in each room for the main light and called it ‘Ceiling light’. Then as part of the prompt I have instructed the LLM to make an exception when a generic turn on/off, or set ‘the light’ when it sees this it is to use the entity named ‘ceiling light’ for the area. So far this seems to work well
(insert big dissertation on llm context here if you’re interested in that read Friday’s Party)
Also, it will become unreliable as your system becomes more complicated. The agent can only do so much with instructions like that as the sys grows.
If it starts missing you’ll have to build that into a dedicated tool that does the reasoning for your agent. Something like control labeled lighting and let it target by label.
Glad it works for now and good luck with your system!
