5 cool things you can do with Home Assistant

Home Assistant is one of the best things you can install if you have a home lab, NAS device, or an SBC like the Raspberry Pi and a burning desire to control all of your smart devices from one dashboard. This handy platform supports thousands of APIs from IoT manufacturers and beyond and can tie your smart home together with deep automation support and connectivity to programs you’d never think of adding to it. With that many options, it’s hard to decide where to start, so we’ve put together a short list of cool projects you can use Home Assistant for, and reclaim your smart home from the manufacturers.

5 Add voice control to your home

Supercharge your smart home without proprietary voice assistants

Voice control of your smart home is pretty high up on the list of cool things you can do because who didn’t want to live on the SS Enterprise when they were growing up? While you could pepper your home with smart speakers to get Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri to help control your other smart devices, that leaves your voice data in the hands of the large tech companies, who have repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted to store it responsibly or remove it when asked. But if you have Home Assistant installed, you can set up your own voice assistant, so that you can use your sultry tones to get Home Assistant to do your bidding.

The setup process is fairly involved, but you’ll learn a ton about connecting different add-ons and services together, leading to a better understanding of what Home Assistant can do. You will need Home Assistant OS running in your home lab, not the containerized version, because the add-on store only works on the full version, and you need many, many add-ons to get voice control working. Once the chain of add-ons are working as intended, you’ll be able to speak into the microphone or other audio capture device you chose and control your smart home without lifting a finger, just like sci-fi TV shows promised you.

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4 Make your voice assistant smarter

Give it Natural Language Processing smarts

Have you ever asked your voice assistant to do something simple, like turn off the lights, only to get a response similar to “I’m sorry, I can’t help with that?” It’s incredibly frustrating, and the reason is that most voice assistants only respond to a very narrow range of word choices. That’s not good news for when you’re distracted and need something enabling via voice commands, which is exactly the best time for voice control to work. But there’s a solution with Home Assistant, in that you can create a local LLM assistant and connect it to Home Assistant, and have it ask follow-up questions to hone in on what you meant in the first place.

Now, thanks to a tutorial from a Hackster user called Ana, you can run and train a local LLM, connect it to Meta’s Llama3 70B model, and have the AI then make API requests based on your spoken feedback. Be warned though, you’ll need a powerful GPU to do this, as the tutorial uses AMD’s Radeon Pro W7900, a card that costs around $4,000 and has plenty of VRAM for holding the LLMs data. While running, the LLM can send an API request to Home Assistant to do an action, or to query device names in the room, ask the user a followup question for more data, and answer the user if they asked a specific question. It’s very much like playing 20 questions with your smart home, but Ana found that it can do a decent job of finding the devices you want to control, assuming they have well-organized descriptive names in Home Assistant. Yes, that means you should set up your HA instance properly, but the time spent will pay off.

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3 Graph everything

With InfluxDB and Grafana, your smart home gets visualized

The more devices you have in your smart home and connected to Home Assistant, the more data that accrues. Normally, that data shows up on your dashboard as some momentary numbers, but that’s a shame to waste the sheer depth of metrics available. But if you add InfluxDB to store all that data in a nicely ordered way, then those metrics, from network bandwidth to energy usage and how long the fridge door was left open, all get stored for future use. Then you install Grafana and turn all of those wonderful numbers into graphs so you can see historical trends at a glance.

2 Control it from your wrist

Smartwatches make amazing smart home remotes

While voice assistants are handy, sometimes you don’t want to make noise to control your smart home. Well, the Android and iOS apps for Home Assistant both support their respective smartwatch ecosystems, so you can use your Wear OS or watchOS devices to control whatever you want in your smart home. Well, as long as you’ve connected your smart home devices to Home Assistant, which you’ve probably done already. Think about it: no more searching for the remote or trying to remember what the correct voice string is. You can just tap on your smartwatch and turn the lights off, or whatever else you use Home Assistant to automate.

1 Sync all your music

Music Assistant links streaming sites and local files together in harmony

Home Assistant is fantastic for linking disparate smart home APIs, but that’s not all it can link. Music Assistant can link APIs from the most popular music streaming sites and link them up with your local media files to build one centralized streaming service. But it’s not just music files it pulls together. This Home Assistant integration supports Airplay, Cast and DLNA, and many other streaming protocols and devices, so you can listen to your music where you want to. It weeds out multiple versions of the same songs to provide a unified library, and it can all be controlled from the Home Assistant dashboard with the deep automation and scripting that it provides.

Home Assistant can be used for many cool projects

With thousands of IoT and smart home APIs supported and an even larger number of sensors, devices, and gadgets that it can control, Home Assistant can do some amazing automation work in your home. You can link presence, temperature, light, or water sensors and use them to automate all kinds of events, like changing the color and brightness of your smart lightbulbs when you turn on the shower for a sultry spa experience. It’s built to link multiple smart home systems together with the minimum of fuss, and the limits are almost as wide as your imagination can be.

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