Physical button for activating Assist, and use existing media player as output

Configuration Voice Assistant
1

Hi all, I was just wondering if anyone had any thoughts about the best way to achieve the following…

I have an ESP based satellite in the office, which works fine, but I sometimes feel like it would be easier to just press a button on my desk, which would activate the satellite, instead of using a wake word.

I was just wondering if anyone’s done anything similar? I have for example a spare SmartThings button doing nothing right now, and was wondering if I could use that to activate assist on the existing office satellite?

Any thoughts would be most appreciated :slight_smile:

2

Just in case anyone is interested, I found a way to activate Assist on an ESPhome based device, using any other entity. Depending on the entity type, you will need to look in the logs of the ESPhome device, after adding the following code to your ESP config. Then change the ‘state’, so that the right state activates Assist.

And as extra info, I had to use a toggle helper as the entity, as the state reporting from the zigbee button (Smartthings) didn’t give a state that could be used. So instead, I turned on a toggle helper with my zigbee button, which in turn activated Assist. Works great!

text_sensor:
  - platform: homeassistant
    id: zigbee_button
    name: zigbee
    entity_id: YOUR_ZIGBEE_BUTTON_ENTITY_ID
    internal: true
    on_value:
      - if:
          condition:
            - lambda: return id(zigbee_button).state == "on";
          then:     
            - lambda: id(va).set_use_wake_word(false);  
            - delay: 50ms
            - voice_assistant.stop:
            - wait_until:
                not:
                  - voice_assistant.is_running:
            - voice_assistant.start:
          else:
            - lambda: id(va).set_use_wake_word(true);  
            - delay: 50ms
            - voice_assistant.stop:
            - wait_until:
                not:
                  - voice_assistant.is_running:
            - voice_assistant.start_continuous:

Big thanks to @robgough1970

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