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Voice Assistants

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tempus2016 edited this page Jun 26, 2026 · 1 revision

TaskMate adds Home Assistant conversation intents so you can ask Assist — by voice or text — about your children's chores and points.

  • "How many chores does Malia have left?"
  • "How many stars does Alex have?"

How It Works

There are two halves to a voice command in Home Assistant:

  1. The intent handler — the code that answers the question. TaskMate ships two intent handlers and registers them automatically when the integration loads. Nothing to install.
  2. The trigger sentences — the phrases HA listens for and maps to an intent. These are not automatic. HA's default conversation agent loads them from your config folder, so you have to copy TaskMate's example sentences in once.

The two intents TaskMate provides:

Intent Answers questions like
TaskMateChoresLeft "How many chores does Malia have left?"
TaskMatePoints "How many stars does Alex have?"

In both, {name} matches any of your children by name (case-insensitive).

Installing the Trigger Sentences

The example sentences ship in the TaskMate repository at custom_sentences/en/taskmate.yaml. Copy that file into your Home Assistant config, keeping the same path:

<config>/custom_sentences/en/taskmate.yaml

Then restart Home Assistant (or reload the conversation integration). After that, ask Assist any of the sentences above and TaskMate will answer.

Other Languages

To use these intents in another language, copy the file under the matching language code, for example:

<config>/custom_sentences/de/taskmate.yaml

Then translate only the sentences: lines into that language. Leave the intent names (TaskMateChoresLeft, TaskMatePoints) and the lists: keys unchanged — those are identifiers, not display text. See Localization for TaskMate's language support generally.

Voice-Friendly To-do Lists

TaskMate also publishes each child's outstanding chores as a native HA to-do list (todo.taskmate_<child name>). Because those are standard to-do lists, voice assistants can read them out and tick items off — completing the chore — with no extra setup. This pairs well with the intents above. See To-Do Lists.

See Also

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