Use alias in voice assistant's response

Configuration Voice Assistant
1

Hi there,
I have set up a couple of custom intents which can be used to set my wall thermostats in different rooms and by that control my heating.
All this works well.

What I do not like that HA reads out the entity name in the response, such as:

The bathroom_heating_group_int0000003 has been set to 17degrees

This is really not nice. Now I could go in and rename those entities to something more friendly but before doing this, and having to edit config files and potentially automations as well I wondered whether there is a way to tell HA to use an alias name rather than the entity name, when it responds?

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Merc

2

I haven’t tested it for this particular case, but you can assign an alias in the Voice Assistant settings by clicking “Expose” at the top then clicking on the entity.

3

Hi Didgeridrew,
Yes I have done this but it has no impact on the response.

Thanks for the suggestion.

4

Did you ever figure this out?

I have a power-switch that’s exposed to voice assistant, and I also gave it an alias “Centre Fan”. But when I successfully say “Hey Jarvis” then “Turn on centre fan”, he responds “Turned on the switch”. I’d like him to say “Turned on the centre fan”.

5

This is a way to make the answers more concise. In other languages, they use different ways - maybe shorter (fr) or longer ones (es).

If a slots.name is used, then it handles both names and alias.

6

Is this what you mean? I created the file, HassTurnOn.yaml under a new folder config/custom_sentences

Do I need to include the whole original content or does it just override my changes?

language: en
responses:
  intents:
    HassTurnOn:
      default: "Turned on the {{ slots.name }}"
7

You will not be able to change the response for built-in intents locally, as far as I know
Translation participants discuss the best practices for interacting with a voice assistant on github, but unfortunately it is impossible to please everyone.
You can also open a discussion on this issue.

For custom sentences, this format is not relevant, since the response is part of the intent script.

8

That’s disappointing as it’s bad enough that for accessibility there is no option to add start and stop sounds to the voice input like I have for all my Google Home devices.

9

You can achieve this by customizing the firmware.