HOME ASSISTANT ACTIONABLE NOTIFICATIONS

[@JoseBerruezo]

Great video, but the bar constantly asking to subscribe is really annoying and distracts the video presentation.

[@smart_home_australia]

Yep. Sorry. Removed from future videos. 😊 well apart from the roundup.

[@DumbMuscle]

"Surely you want to turn on your alarm when you leave and disarm your alarm when you arrive home" - Definitely spoken as someone who has never turned off all the lights and heating on a houseguest when you have someone over for a few days and head out somewhere (speaking from experience, as I did that to my current partner before we properly moved in together - left her home in an increasingly freezing house while I went to work for the day, and only saw the series of increasingly annoyed messages at lunch! Luckily I didn't have an alarm at the time...). Adding a " Leaving home. Automations will be triggered in X minutes, disable?" notification would be neat (doubly so if it works in Android Auto) Also, as some general feedback, I like the presentation style here - especially as you're listening to other's feedback. You have a really clear presentation style which hits just the right level of neither skimming over the complex features (i'm just starting out, and I've learned a bunch just from things you do as part of the process, tangential to the guides themselves), or diving so deep that folks end up confused.

[@smart_home_australia]

@DumbMuscle, thanks for the feedback, really glad you like the presentation style. As to your question, it depends, lol...if you live alone then yes I would definitely have the alarm activate on leaving automatically and disarm when arriving home. However, as soon as you add family members or house guests into the mix the user case changes. You don't want to arm an alarm when there is potentially still someone in the house. Now I have coded the notification so that the alarm doesn't even send me the notification if another family member (who should all be running the HA companion app) is still in the house. However, even after this check I still don't automatically arm just in case of a house guest. Now there is an option to code a "Guest Mode" using helpers, into the home but this potentially impacts a significant number of automations, and you should plan this from the outset, as retrospectively recoding all your automations is going to be a long and slow process. I hope that explains my logic choices, as I mentioned, this is on a user case by user case so turning on automatically might be the best option for you.

Great work, thanks for sharing!

[@smart_home_australia]

You’re welcome. I hope you found the video helpful. If you don’t mind sharing, let us know what actionable notification you implemented. It’s always great fun to learn what amazing user cases people come up with.

[@CraigSpiteri]

Thankyou, great video

[@smart_home_australia]

Glad you enjoyed it

[@LunaMoon_32]

I am a bit late to this video, but I need some assistance. When ever I write a space after the dash next to actions in automation one it disables the script and doesnt bring up the actions.

[@LunaMoon_32]

and one other thing, how would I broadcast from a homepod or a google device?

[@smart_home_australia]

Hi for Google, yes that the same process as before using TTS, I'd suggest reading through this community post for the instructions: community.home-assistant.io/t/how-can-i-send-a-voice-announcement-to-a-google-home-device-via-an-ha-alert/220668 HomePods are a bit more hit and miss, read through this post and it will show you the challeneges. community.home-assistant.io/t/homepod-mini-as-tts-devices/358465/34 I don't currently have an Apple HomePod that I can test and create a video for you. But maybe with some more channel members I can get one :)

[@paulmikols6705]

I’m pretty sure you can put all these into 1 automation using trigger IDs.

[@smart_home_australia]

Hi @paulmikols6705, I'm sure you can (I haven't tried :)) as with all programming there are many ways to optimise, rewrite and compress. As this was a brief tutorial I wanted to make sure everyone could understand the concept and get a working, and more importantly, maintainable solution. If you do manage to compress and optimise maybe you would share here your YAML?

[@cymesik1975]

Well done. But…. Really? You’ve made it for beginners?

[@smart_home_australia]

Hi @cymesik1975 , Thanks. Actionable Notifications is a huge topic that you could make a whole series of videos about with many hours of topics. My videos are aimed at the beginner and intermediate Home Assistant users, it gives them a view of what is possible so they can take that knowledge and explore these more advanced features.