The baseline here is asking about the weather and forecasts with Alexa. That allows all manner of queries about the weather, the forecast and different areas. I’m wondering what it would take to get the assistant to be as versatile.
Alexa allows for all kinds of queries. Some assume current location. But will lookup another if you specific “in location-name”. What’s the forecast? What’s the weather tonight|tomorrow|day-of-week. It’s handy to use this for upcoming travel. As in, you live in one area and are traveling to another. Alexa will readily handle “What’s the forecast for tomorrow in other-location?” Our kid loved to ask it for temps in oddball locations, like apparently the coldest place in Russia: “What’s temperature in Oymyako?”
There are indeed all kinds of other concerns/problems/issues with using an Alexa, that’s not what I’m discussing here. I mention it as a baseline for comparison.
Any llm which has the tool use capability which has an appropriate tool that can call out an search the web can do this.
To date using the default api calls and chatgpt this was not possible. But now that you see them adding tool use capability to the voice pipe (that’s what MCP is that was added in 2025.2)
Sonwhat happens if you setup the right tools. You say hay llm get x. It searches the elweb and gets the answer and…
You can also do something like this pointed at a custom ollama installation with tools or anything that allows tool use to be exposed to the ai on its end. MCP allows the tools to ve connected direct to HA.
The beauty is once your llm can use an external to provide capability… it just does
Id pay a lot of attention to the year of voice chapter 9 stuff coming out this week. I strongly suspect it’s a lot of what you’re looking for. It was probably what was supposed to be the ‘star’ of February before backup blew up like it did in January.
