This has been solved. Scroll down to the bottom of this post to see the solution.
I am running into an issue with the Assist Button, both on iOS and MacOS. I am a Nabu Casa subscriber. Under Home Assistant → Settings → Voice Assistants, I have both Home Assistant Cloud and the default Home Assistant setting configured. Home Assistant Cloud is set to Preferred. Home Assistant 2025.1.0.
On iOS, I use the Ask Assist button from my widget screen (swiped all the way left). When tapping the button, the assist screen opens, but queries are not answered until I manually select which voice assistant I want to talk to from the drop down in the top of the screen. The options are Home Assistant Cloud and Home Assistant. By default this drop down is empty.
On MacOS, using the assist button, I get the pop up where I can speak my query. But when done recording, it pops up a dialog asking “Which One?” and making me choose which voice assistant I want to talk to. Also here the options are Home Assistant Cloud and Home Assistant. Once I select one of the assistants, the process just stops and I get no response.
I also tried deleting the local Home Assistant voice assistant (I run on an older Raspberry Pi) so it is not that useful anyway, but I still have to manually select the one remaining Home Assistant Cloud voice assistant.
I would expect that the preferred voice assistant is preselected and I don’t have to manually select a voice assistant unless I really want to change the assistant.
Anybody else seeing this or found a solution for this?
SOLUTION:
The iOS button was actually a widget. I just remembered that you can edit widget settings through a long press. Once you select “Edit Widget” you can change the settings. The setting for the pipeline was “Preferred”, so it should have worked, but I could change it to Home Assistant Cloud and now it works.
The MacOS button is actually a MacOS Shortcut. I installed this a long time ago and had completely forgotten how it works. Anyway, In the Shortcuts App, you’ll see a tile for the Assist Button. Right Click and select “Edit”. A new window appears with the flow for the shortcut. Scroll down in the flow until you see Assist with “Dictated Text” and click on “Show More” on that line. Now you can choose a Server and a Pipeline. Select your Home Assistant server and the pipeline you want to use.