Please make it easy to disable the Assist feature from Settings. It's not a choice if the alternative means giving up automatic config

Feature Requests
43

Incidentally, this thread is now the second result if you Google “How to disable Assist in Home Assistant”.

@tom_l, please could you PM me the contact details of someone who’s authorised to speak to media on behalf of Nabu Casa? It makes it easier on the fact checking team if they can go direct.

44

That would be @GuySie according to this: About us. I don’t have their contact details.

45

Hey guys,

I am fairly new to HomeAssistant, and so far I had a great journey.
I must say, that I also actively dislike not having a way to disable the assistant/referalls to the assistant in the gui. I understand, that some money has to be made through home assistant, and HA is absolutely harmless in stuff it tries to make you do, but the whole Assistant thing leaves a sour taste in my mouth, similarly to the first setting category being “Home assistant cloud”.

I respect the fact that you can disable the assistant by changing the yaml, but as previously stated by @DeeBeeKay, it certainly felt nonconsensual, trying to force me to subscribe to a cloud service/make it an auto-opt-in feature.

I also agree, as the previous posters, that I don’t see it being likely to be reverted to an “opt-in”-feature, but I still think it is important to voice my impression. I even took my time to register specifically for that purpose.

46

I’m sorry, but that is not correct. You don’t automatically opt-in. And neither are you in any way required to be a subscriber.

Honestly, I can’t see where the fuzz is coming from. It is simple, and practically copy&paste, if you don’t want Assist included in your default configuration. The majority of users wants it that way, that’s why it is handled this way.

For the very few, that don’t want it, they can delete that part of the configuration with a piece of code that is inserted in less than one minute.

And let’s not forget, using and enabling Assist does not require any outside subscription, opt-in or whatsoever. With the default config, your Assist is locally enabled. Nothing else. It’s not like you would give your soul out in the open, it’s still only a local assistant, with no costs.

I really can’t see, where anything with this is automatic opt-in. If you want more functionality, you can opt-in, but you don’t have to to use Assist.

Sorry, to say, but that sour taste doesn’t come from HA, that’s for sure. It might have to do something with not enough informed… :slight_smile:

1 Like
47

Just for people who also land here on google, what you have to do if you follow through with disabling the default_config:

  1. You need to access the config yamls. You can do that via SSH or via AddOns like the VSCode addon.
  2. You are interested in the configuration.yaml file.
  3. You need to comment out/delete the line with default_config:
  4. You need to go to Default Config - Home Assistant, manually open every link, and see how the integrations have to be loaded. Currently, as of 12.05.2024, I have the following list:
#assist_pipeline:
backup:
bluetooth:
config:
#conversation:
dhcp:
energy:
history:
homeassistant_alerts:
#cloud:
image_upload:
logbook:
media_source:
mobile_app:
my:
ssdp:
stream:
sun:
usb:
webhook:
zeroconf:

I have commented out the assist, conversation and cloud entries, which should in my opinion be opt-in additions. I rebooted the system, and everything works as expected. I will have to watch out for new default changes in the future, I guess.

48

So you’re asking that the developers create an opt-in to ENABLE those features, instead of the much easier to implement opt-in to use them. I can understand that, I suppose, but where do they draw the line once they start? Should they make them all opt-in?