Set Alarm and do a thing at a specific time

Configuration Voice Assistant
1

So I find there are only two things keeping me attached to Siri. The first is using it as an alarm clock, the second is telling Siri to perform an action (usually turning something on or off) at a specific time.

As an example, our wakeup times change a lot depending on what we have going on that particular day. Siri and Alexa both handle the functions of alarms very well, (set an alarm for…, snooze, stop, etc.). I find that the Voice Preview Edition isn’t able to do that, and tells me that it can only set timers.

Using the same example, my wife likes the coffee to start brewing about 15 minutes before we wake up. We use a simple coffee maker with a shelly plug to turn on/off. So our nightly routine now will be something along the lines of “Siri, set an alarm for 5:30 am”, followed by “Siri turn on the coffeemaker at 5:15 am”. Despite Siri’s many shortcomings, it performs these activities quite well.

Previously we used Amazon/Alexa, but at the time it couldn’t do the thing-at-a-specific-time so I had a complicated set of scripts that would read the next alarm time and turn on the coffee maker 15 minutes before. That was controlled by an “auto coffee” switch, so after setting the alarm with Alexa we’d say “Alexa, turn on auto coffee” if we wanted it to auto-start the next morning. it worked most of the time, but not always, and it seemed to fail when we really needed it, so the reason for the switch to HomePod Minis and Siri.

I find that I’m unable to do either with the VPE; I can’t set an alarm for a specific time, and I can’t tell it to perform an action at a specific time, so I’m stuck with Siri for the unforeseeable future.

Posting all that to see if anyone has had similar issues and has a solution. My wife and daughter love the current voice-controlled routines and use them daily. Also, I wouldn’t be able to get them to open a device and manually enter alarms. I’d be kicked out of the house LOL so need to stick with voice.

I’ve only used the VPE for local voice with HA, but open to other local voice solutions to get the desired results.

Thanks in advance for any/all suggestions.

Terry

2

You can use the next alarm from the phone to sense when the next alarm is.
And subtract 15 minutes from this time using the offset.
And you can use a boolean as the condition to know if to turn on the coffe or not.

So in real life you tell the voice to turn on the boolean coffe, this allows the automation above to run and as an action in the automation turn off the boolean again to not trigger again tomorrow.

Or do you mean they don’t have alarms set at all on their phones.
They completely rely on the voice?
I would not want a mains powered device to wake me up. Although it’s very rare, power could fail.
You can probably make it set an alarm on the phone. I don’t have the voice PE.
If you have android then a notification can set an alarm on the phone.
So if you can get the time from the voice message then this could be passed as notification to the phone.
I guess it will be cumbersome to set up and possibly to use if they aren’t used to phone alarms as it is now.

3

It’s completely voice to HomePod Minis at the moment, we don’t use our phones for alarms at all

4

Bumping to see if there are any suggestions…

Terry

5

You can maybe try to use a home assistant voice as a alarm clock: Alarm clock with voice - #8 by ChristianKuehnel

6

Thanks, I’ll give this a try and report back.
Terry