CUSTOM SENTENCE TO TRIGGER AN AUTOMATION is very good
BUT
why not be able to recover the sentence that triggered the automation to be able to TEST it in a template for example. if sentence.triggered == “I’m leaving” then blablabla else blablabla
I think it will give a lot more power to use custom sentence in automation
Have you tried the Voice Assistant Debug tools?
Select the assistant you want to test, then click the 3-dots menu for Debug.