I don’t think anyone should be aiming for 100% automation. You just want to get close and have a system robust and user friendly enough to handle the few exceptions.
To put it simply. You want your lights to turn on at the correct brightness almost every day of the year. But during a party it is fine if you adjust them manually, as long as you don’t have to fight the automation.
If I’m not aiming for 100%, why should I need ML at all and not continue with my working automations? To enable ML, I would need to disable all my automations an do everything manually for at least 1 year to gather sufficient data, wouldn’t I? I think my life is just too unpredictable to get the desired results from ML (at the moment).
Don’t understand me wrong, I’m definitely for ML for Home Assistant at one point, but not now. I’d prefer to have the focus on “finishing” HA, before starting with ML. Just my two cents.
We’re pretty far from using effective machine learning for HA imo, but not necessarily no. It would help to have some historical data to set it up of course, but a good ML algorithm will correct itself based on your actions.
But you don’t want to push it to the last 100% in general, because then it will tend to ‘overcorrect’. For machine learning to work I tihnk you need to accept a little bit of noise.
So what is the advantage then? I expect ML to be way more effective in the end in capturing more complex behaviour and to work with relatively little setup. It will cost you in ‘learning’ time though. But for my home at least, a lot of behaviour has proven to be quite difficult to catch in simple automations. It should become as simple as picking an algorithm, tweaking some variables and picking the involved entities/devices.
Bayesian sensors have already proven to be more effective for me for instance even though they are very crude, but need some work before they are generally usable I think. (I’ve tried, but I need more UI-coding knowledge, but I’ve got the ML part with active learning somewhat working for a prototype).
Oh, and to add, since this was a bit of a tangent, it is my personal believe that a home can never be fully automated so you shouldn’t try/aim for that. What I mean is that cases were the automation doesn’t work have to be handled well, because they will always happen and are integral to the experience. unexpected things WILL happen and ML isn’t magic.