I use Google Assistant integration (so I can control things using my Google Home app and speakers.
I wish there was a way to “hide” entities/devices easily, without having to go through a menu for each and every device.
I have over 200 devices at home and it takes absolute ages to configure everything.
I wish there was a page that listed all my devices, where I could see things almost as if on a spreadsheet table, where I could easily edit the fields to change the entity’s area, toggle exposure to voice assistant on/off with one click, etc. A bulk editor if you will.
It really surprises me that all the bits we’d need are there already (the database) but there’s no frontend to view everything as a table.
I suggest this bulk editor to facilitate assigning areas to devices, or to easily change areas, and to expose or de-expose entities to voice assistants more easily. This will be essential as you are now doing your own voice hardware. With lots of devices it is cumbersome and tiresome to edit these things.
It will be important because many voice commands rely on area, so imagine adding area to 200+ devices by clicking the integration, clicking the device within the integration, clicking the pencil icon, choosing the area, saving, then going back to integrations page, then repeating this over and over. It would be so much easier in a bulk editor.
This is why many of us set the Area a device is in when we set up the Integration. I suppose I could support having a way to bulk add them if you chose not to, as it would be a convenient thing to have.
Unfortunately in a legacy home assistant installation it’s difficult. Also difficult if you need to do disaster recovery with hundreds of devices and don’t have time to keep assigning areas manually right now as you just want to get essentials working but need to postpone assigning areas to later. Needs to have an easier way of assigning for sure because nowadays HA is so well supported there are thousands of compatible devices. When I started using this project it was like 2017 and it was nothing like this. It has grown a lot, and it’s very complex, it needs to start focusing on ease of use and organization at some point as it becomes overwhelming to manage so many devices without bulk editing… I hope you can understand my point
Thank you for this, it’s cool, what about entities though? Unfortunately not all “things” get exposed as a device, unless I’m misunderstanding? Is it possible to have a column for ticking on/off to expose to voice assistant on this page also? I’ll explore this more later but good to see there’s “something” already there for “poking”
