Now my interface HA Google Assistant is in place. Then I more understand the pain to not be able to manage this using UI.
I filtered by domain (sensor, light, cover, switch) + manual include/exclude but I don’t like this solution.
The UI with Alias and expose button seems much more user friendly.
To be clear :
Personally I don’t mind supporting Nabu Casa, but I don’t want to rely on their infrastructure, hence why I use the manual Google Assistant setup.
I understand that the scale in which HA & ESPHome are developed requires a steady money flow, but HA was built so you wouldn’t rely on a cloud provider. Why make this feature cloud only, even for paying customers?
This would be a nice change. I enjoy setting things up myself, but going though all my entities and exposing them manually via yaml and having to reboot home assistant is not something I consider fun.
Home assistant cloud is nice for those who want to skip manual setup, but I think manual setup shouldn’t result in a lesser experience like it does now.
I used to sub to ha cloud for a long time before I set everything up manually just because I could, as it just made sense to do so as my homelab grew and I already had everything I needed running (reverse proxy etc.). I still plan to continue to donate to home assistant, but I don’t need to rely on them anymore to set things up for me, so it would be nice to have the same way to expose entities to Google assistant as ha cloud users have.
Exposing all entities, or even exposing by domains is problematic as I and probably many others have reduntand entities from combining multiple lights to one group (I know I could hide them but I want to also have them accessible one by one). This leads to me having to still block devices one by ine even when exposing by domain. Add the requirements of needing a reboot every time and it’s a really cumbersome experience.
You ever spent months of your life rolling a product out to make people’s lives easier?
It’s about time, skills and knowledge. Hass is open source, write the code and make a new integration that does this instead of talking shi* on the internet and demanding that others put in the work for you.
Nothing wrong with people making things easier and charging for it. There is however something wrong with freeloaders talking crap and disparaging something they don’t like when all they need to do is learn the skills and gain the knowledge to do it themselves.