I have just started using Home Assistant and have shelved my SmartThings and Hue hubs but miss a skill that I use to have that ran on groovy that SmartThings will know longer be supporting. The skill was Ask Alexa. The skill enabled me to get the status of devices. It was really nice to be able to say “Alexa, ask the house for house status” and have her tell me what lights or devices that I forgot to turn off. I use to use this all the time when I went to bed and it was nice to ask the dot in my bedroom instead of having to get out of bed and go around the house to find what lights or devices I left on. I had Ask Alexa set to just tell me the names of the devices that were on. I hope one day I can have something comparable with Home Assistant! I contacted the creator of Ask Alexa and he said that it was possible and that he was currently using something on Home Assistant that was doing this and said that he would help me if I had any questions but I hate to impose. He stated that there was a lot of information out there but after doing what felt like to me an exhaustive search I couldn’t find anything. Some hints I got from him are below and any help or links on this subject from anyone would be greatly appreciated.
The example you listed is something I still have now…if you understand YAML, this might be insightful to give you something you can use. Like my old app (Alexa Helper), it is triggered by a virtual switch that HA listens to, then broadcasts the list of the devices that are on:
service: input_text.set_value
target:
entity_id: input_text.messagetextoutput1
data:
value: >-
The following devices are on
{%- for entity_id in
states.group.house_switches.attributes.entity_id -%}
{%- set parts =entity_id.split(‘.’) -%}
{%- if (states(entity_id)) == ‘on’ -%}
{{’, ’ + states[parts[0]][parts[1]].name}}
{%-endif -%}
{%- endfor -%}
Basically, I have my lights in a group, and the loop cycles through the lights that are on. This is goes into a text variable that is later on the app (not here) that exports the text.