So i need help. i want to come away from Alexa completely. i have everything working great my smart home is almost perfect with one massive BUT timers for cooking!!! on Alexa you all know we can ask it to get a timer for say 20 minutes then after 20 minutes an alarm sounds. I’m trying to get this working in home assistant on my tablet. currently i can ask Nabo to set a timer and it does only thing is when the timer is up all i get is a little notification that is easily missed with no alarm. I’ve trolled YouTube and can’t find anything that explains how to do this have been going down ChatGPT rabbit holes for hours upon hours and still can’t get it to work. All i want is a countdown timer with an alarm when it finishes; surely it can be this hard.
So i come to you. Please can any of you lovely people help me set this up.
At least in part this depends on the voice assistant satellite. If you are using the Voice Preview Edition or some of the various spinoffs (I use the Seeed Studio reSpeaker XVF3800 with formatBCE’s software), the timer end noise is pretty load and accompanied by lights. I have no idea what it looks like on a tablet though. I think to find out if you can get away from alexa you need to try some satellites, for me the quality of the mic (and to a far lesser degree speakers) is what kept me with Google for so long. I think I’m just about that though.
Do you have any speakers in your kitchen? If you have a trigger to hang it on you could send a sound to the nearest media_player - no need to do everything in the voice assistant.
Timer is the weakest part of the builtin toolset currently. It is on thier planned roadmap to update. But I dot know the timing.
So unfortunately my answer is YES it is that hard rn.
If you want that you’re going to have to write it yourself.
That said both Thyraz and I have written timer tools for the tool sets we built (mine shipped in my current beta) and they both read specifically formatted common timers if configured. There’s a custom. Card. Somewhere (I do t have the link) that can display a specifically formatted custom timer. And both my tool and Thyraz’s use that same structure. I’ll see if I can find the card and link it. If not go read the timer script in ZenOS beta. I think I link to the timer card in the help for it.
Even if you do use one of our tools or byo, it’s not perfect currently and the dev team has some plans I just don’t know timing or exact implementation details.