Make it so Siri can't disable automations

Third party integrations Homebridge
1

Hey all!

I have a couple automations in my instance for things like controlling my speaker’s volume. However, since the Home Bridge integration syncs automations as switches, saying something like “Siri, turn off the living room” or “Siri, turn everything off” also disables the automations, which is not desirable.

What are my options to prevent this behaviour? I can’t make an automation to turn the others back on, since all automations get disabled.

Thanks!

2

Sounds as if you have assigned your automations to an area, so they’re getting switched off along with everything else.

3

Automations should not be exposed to Homekit or any voice control, because they are meant to be triggered automatically. Manually running automations is not advised, because they bypass triggers and conditions, and have no input for the trigger variable that an automation might expect. Turning an automation on trough Siri is probably also not what the voice command intended.

If you have grouped commands that need to be run manually, create a script. Then, if needed, create automations to automatically start the script. If you do that, then there is no reason to expose the automations themselves to Siri or Homekit. You can also safely assign automations and scripts to areas.

Scripts can be exposed to Homekit or voice control. Turning them on runs them (that makes sense) and turning them off stops running scripts, and that also makes sense.

4

That makes sense for the “turn everything in the living room off”, but I also don’t want the automations to be disabled when I say something like “turn everything off”.

5

It was not my choice to sync the automations to HomeKit myself. Turning an automation on or off through HomeKit doesn’t trigger it, it simply enables/disabled it. It doesn’t run it at any point.

Again, it was not my choice to sync automations to HomeKit. That’s a HomeBridge feature, one I can’t seem to find a setting for to disable.

6

I’m not a HomeKit user, but having a quick look at the docs suggests excluding automations is possible if you configure the integration using yaml.

homekit:
  filter:
    exclude_domains:
      - automation
7

That’s absolutely perfect, thank you! I missed that option.

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