I’ve been experimenting with voice, both M5 echo (old and new) and VPE, and also with native STT, STP, and numerous LLM models.
I’m getting closer, but I have one specific issue I can’t find.
I have a switched outlet called “Office Outlet” in the Office area, with entity id switch.office_outlet. Because of STP testing, I added an alias “Parrot Plug” to get a name very different from other names. Now in Ollama I think that alias is causing it to fail.
Here’s a recent test. What’s odd about this is that it figured it out. I said “office outlet” and it actually came back with the alias shown, so it FOUND the device. And it is in the office. But it’s munged together the two correct names. Or something. This was ollama with qwen3:4b-instruct.
Aliases are supposed to work, right? Actually intended for voice?
In the instructions sent to the model (the green “system” bar on the screen shot), the outlet appears as:
- names: Office Outlet, Parrot Plug
domain: switch
areas: Office
Is that being formatted incorrectly perhaps by… HA? Unlike integrations where I can see the actual template code to produce instructions, I don’t see it in this case, just three lines, so I am assuming the code to format this is hard coded in somewhere (ollama integration)?
Any idea what I am doing wrong that it can’t find it despite having, well, found it?
Yes, I can probably fix it by removing the alias, but I have some other names where aliases will be handy and want to understand what’s happening.
This is HA on HAOS, HA version 2026.7.2 core, all integrations are released versions not beta/etc.