Home Assistant is the most powerful smart home platform. You can connect and control an almost endless array of smart home devices and build powerful automations that simply aren't possible with systems such as Alexa and Google Home.
Creating these automations can be a challenge, but using an AI chatbot such as ChatGPT can help.
Use AI to Help Create Your Automations
Creating complex smart home automations in Home Assistant can be hard. In the old days, you'd have to write everything manually in YAML, but the addition of the automation editor has made things easier.
While the automation editor is great for many automations, when you're trying to create something more complex, things can soon get out of hand. For example, I wanted to create a medication reminder automation that would send me a critical notification each evening at 7.30 telling me to take my medication. This is simple enough to set up in the automation editor.
However, I wanted to make this an actionable notification with options to remind me again in thirty minutes, an hour, or two hours, or to remind me again silently in an hour. This is far from trivial to create using the automation editor and would likely have taken me several hours of head-scratching to figure out.
I told ChatGPT what I wanted to achieve, and within seconds, it had generated the YAML configuration for an automation that would do exactly what I wanted. By pasting this directly into the automations.yaml file, my automation was instantly created. I tested it out, and with one or two tweaks, it worked exactly as I wanted. It took me maybe five minutes to get the complete automation up and running, saving me hours of stress and frustration.
Adding ChatGPT's code to the "Edit in YAML" view in the automation editor may cause errors. I had more success by adding it directly to the automations.yaml file using the File Editor add-on.
ChatGPT Can Help Debug Your Code
Before the automation editor made creating complex automations in Home Assistant easier, I built most of mine using Node Red. This is a flow-based visual programming tool that lets you create complex automations by connecting together function blocks called nodes. I found the low-code, visual nature of Node Red easier to use than creating everything in YAML.
One of the most powerful features of Node Red is that, if necessary, you can use a function node to run custom code written in JavaScript. This can often be simpler than trying to achieve the same outcome purely with nodes. The trouble is, if there's an error in your JavaScript, the whole thing breaks down.
I used to lose hours trying to locate the flaws in my JavaScript that were stopping my automations from working, only for the problem to be something dumb like using the wrong type of quotation mark. With ChatGPT, however, you can simply paste your code into the chatbot and ask it to find the errors. It will usually quickly spot the dumb mistake you've made.
AI Can Suggest Solutions You Might Not Have Considered
Since ChatGPT can use web search, it has access to all the Home Assistant documentation as well as all the posts from the official forum or from Reddit. This means it can suggest methods you may not even be aware of.
The lack of simple if-then-else logic in Home Assistant's automation editor was one of the reasons I used Node Red for all my more complex automations. Once I'd started doing so, I didn't use the automation editor for anything but the simplest automations, so I missed out on the addition of the "choose" action, and later the "if-then" action that make complex automations easier to create with the automation editor.
When I asked it to create my medication reminder automation, ChatGPT immediately used the "choose" action, which was the first time I'd come across it. It led me down a rabbit hole of all the automation actions that I hadn't been using before, which have given me a much better idea of what I can do without having to turn to Node Red.
Let AI Help Optimize Your Automations
There's more than one way to skin a cat. Quite a lot of the time, when I'm building complex automations in the automation editor, I definitely don't end up using the most optimal method. I often end up with a mess of helpers or multiple separate automations in order to achieve what I want to do. The automation may work, but it's a bit of a mess and harder to debug if things go wrong.
ChatGPT can suggest much better ways to achieve the same result. When I first asked it to create my medication reminder, it came up with a method that used one helper and three distinct automations to achieve the desired result. The helper was to determine if the medication had been taken, the first automation sent the initial notification, the second handled the different options in the actionable notification, and the third reset the "medication taken" helper to off at 3 am every morning.
This was fine, but I didn't really want three separate automations for one task. I asked ChatGPT if it could combine it into a single automation, and it instantly did so, with the same functionality built into one automation rather than three.
I realized that I could use the same trick to optimize my other messy automations, too. By telling ChatGPT what the automations did, I was able to get it to combine multiple automations into one, significantly reducing my messy list of automations.
Use AI API Calls Within Your Automations
AI can be used for far more than creating or fixing your automations. You can use it within your automations to make them far more capable. With powerful enough hardware, you can run local LLMs that you can call on within your automations, but you can also access popular AI services such as Google Gemini and ChatGPT using their APIs.
For example, I use Google Gemini to create snarky descriptions of snapshots from my video doorbell whenever a person is detected. It's not the most useful automation, but it's always entertaining to see how it describes visitors.
You can use LLMs for almost anything you want, such as personalized announcements that change every time, creating summaries of the states of your smart home devices, providing natural language alerts about problems in your smart home, or even to monitor the location of pets.
ChatGPT and Other Chatbots Are Still Far From Perfect
There's something important to remember here. An AI chatbot is like that one friend we all have who thinks they know everything. While they may know a lot, when there's something they don't know, they'll just make it up. The trouble is, it's very hard to determine what's real and what's made up.
LLMs are the same. Most of the time, what they tell you is accurate, but sometimes they will just completely make things up with no basis in fact at all. It can be very hard to be sure what's accurate and what isn't.
Asking ChatGPT to create an automation can work a lot of the time. Sometimes, however, the automation may not work at all and will be full of glaring errors. In reality, the most likely outcome is that your automation simply doesn't work, but there is always a risk that the badly formed automation could cause more serious problems.
It's always wise to check the automations carefully before you deploy them, or simply don't use ChatGPT to create automations for anything critical. You can even ask ChatGPT to explain what each part of the code does if any of it doesn't make sense.
Home Assistant is, in my opinion, by far the best software for running your smart home. The steep learning curve stops it from being the right option for many people, however. Using AI chatbots such as ChatGPT can remove some of the barriers to using Home Assistant by helping you to create complex automations without having to write them from scratch yourself. It's not perfect, but when it works, it can help you to produce automations in seconds that would have been much harder to build otherwise.