“Flash Briefing” Concept, Timers etc

[prisma copper]

Hey all,
I am interested in the new voice assistant device and will probably get one but I wanted to ask about my main use cases and if that may be supported in this new device. Critical things for me include:

• Turn things on and off and ask about the state of things
• Flash briefing concept that plays my top podcasts with the ability to pause and resume.
• Ability to create multiple named timers there the timer name is announced when it is up.
• Ability to ask questions around cooking conversions etc (ChatGPT integration?)
• Questions from the internet etc (Chat GPT?)

Anyone know if some or all of these are possible?

Thanks!

[kind bone]

Turn things on and blah: possible
Playing podcasts: depends on your setup. Do you have podcasts in HA already?
Multiple timers - yes. Announcing timer name - probably, but additional (pretty deep) setup needed.
GPT integration: possible.

Everything is possible if you master it. But all the capabilities depend on HA, not on the device itself. PE is just good microphones.

[prisma copper]

Makes sense, I feel like these are basic requirements that a lot of people might have. I suppose if the team can make this super accessible it’s going to really help with people considering this is a strong alternative to other options. I’ll certainly give it a go and try to nerd out where I can.Thanks for the response.

[kind bone]

Case is, that most of your requests are done on HA side, with your hands. 🙂 because, for example, one person wants podcasts from Spotify - another guy wants Tidal or local library... They all have different APIs, so it would take ages to implement and support all possible solutions.

[shell charm]

Yeah, pretty much everything above is possible through integrations, natively, or some simple automations 🙂

[prisma copper]

I think the home assistant audio will struggle without making this a bit easier. I thought this would be simpler honestly. I do have Apple Music in the Music Assistant app, I have a free Spotify and Amazon Music prime account. Ideally it would use Apple Podcasts. But given these parameters what would be the best option here to have a flexible solution vs hard coding RSS feeds? Any ideas or success stories?

Thanks!

[shell charm]

You could see if anyone has shared blueprints for the functionality you are looking for. I have the ability to ask for the weather, check calendar, etc, i just wrote few scripts following the documentation on the home Assistant site. If you use an llm you can make it even easier by just writing scripts that retrieve data and letting the llm summarize it for you.

[prisma copper]

I’m sure I could write some code or see if I can find a blueprint. But definitely think that the community or HA need to support this in a way that would make it accessible for less technical users.

[kind bone]

That's the trick - community doesn't "need" to do anything, it's community. It either does it or not. Mostly it does. 🙂
The voice is very young. It's basically in alpha stage. Showing its possibilities. So either wait for good people to share their work for free - or make an effort to do it yourself and share your work. That's how community works. 🙂

[prisma copper]

Of course, I was more saying that in relation to growing the adoption of home assistant. As a person who has been using it for years, I want to see it succeed as much as anyone else. While, I don’t know, Python, perhaps I’ll take it upon myself to figure it out.

[shell charm]

don't really need to know Python to make these things happen. Just good 'ol YAML and Jinja2 templating

Can technically do it in the UI if you prefer, can make them as automations with sentence triggers for instance.

Or write scripts in the UI and expose to LLM 🙂