Home Assistant allows you to create incredible automations that can do almost anything you want.The problem is that it can be hard to know what to automate next, and you end up in automation paralysis.A HACS integration can help by suggesting automations based on your specific smart home.
What AI Automation Suggester does Scanning entities and generating automation ideas AI Automation Suggester is a custom integration that’s designed to generate ideas for automations based on your smart home setup.It looks at devices, entities, areas, and automations you already have, and uses AI to come up with suggestions for automations that you could set up in your home.The AI analyzes the current state of your home, looks for gaps or potential improvements in your current automations, and suggests automations that can fill those gaps.
As well as suggesting ideas, it also generates ready-to-paste YAML for creating those automations that you can edit and tweak to suit your needs.The integration needs access to an AI model to run.It supports a wide range of popular cloud-based AI options, including OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, and OpenRouter.
You can also connect to a local LLM using options such as Ollama and LocalAI.Some of the cloud-based options may incur API fees or have rate limits for free tiers.I tested this out using the free tier of Groq, which worked reasonably well.
Home Assistant Green Dimensions (exterior) 4.41"L x 4.41"W x 1.26"H Weight 12 Ounces Home Assistant Green is a pre-built hub directly from the Home Assistant team.It's a plug-and-play solution that comes with everything you need to set up Home Assistant in your home without needing to install the software yourself. $219 at Amazon Expand Collapse Installing the integration and choosing a provider You can find it in HACS Installing the integration is fairly simple to do as long as you already have HACS installed.You can find the integration in HACS by searching for AI Automation Suggester.
Select it and download it, and then restart Home Assistant.Once Home Assistant restarts, go to Settings > Devices & services and click the Add integration button in the Integrations tab.Search for AI Automation Suggester, select the result, and install the integration.
Once installed, you’ll need to select your AI provider from the dropdown list.You may need to scroll down to see all the available options.You’ll need to enter the API key for your provider of choice and choose a model if you don’t want to use the default.
There are also options such as Max Input Tokens, which limit the length of the AI’s response, so you don’t chew through API credits with an enormous response.You can add a custom system prompt if you want to force the AI to respond in a specific way.The suggestions were a mixed bag Narrowing the scope definitely helped I set up the integration with Groq as my AI provider, using the default model for Groq, which is llama-3.3-70b-versatile.
You can trigger the suggestion manually with the ai_automation_suggester.generate_suggestions action.For my first run, I left everything as the default settings.The results appear in Home Assistant persistent notifications, but I set up a dedicated dashboard to display them.
The first suggestions were fairly simple: the first was an automation to monitor network traffic, and the second was an automation to welcome me home and turn on a light when my device tracker state changed to home.These were fairly generic ideas.However, when you generate suggestions, you can add parameters that can improve the results.
You can limit the suggestions to specific domains, exclude entities or areas, limit the number of entities, allow the AI to read your automations.yaml file, and add a custom prompt to steer the AI toward a specific type of suggestion.By making these changes, the results were much better.It suggested ideas such as automatically turning on my home office lights when I enter the room, triggered by my presence sensor.
I already have this automation, but I hadn’t exposed my automations.yaml, so it was promising to see a suggestion for an automation I’d already set up.Related These Are the 7 Best Ways to Run Home Assistant Find the best hardware for your smart home hub.Posts 7 By Adam Davidson It then followed up with suggestions for pausing my music when I left the room, which wasn’t something I currently had set up and was a genuinely useful idea.
It also suggested ideas such as dynamically changing the brightness of my lights throughout the day, limiting the volume of my media players, and automatically adjusting the lighting when I started to watch something on the TV.Subscribe to the newsletter for Home Assistant automation ideas Get the newsletter for practical Home Assistant guidance: curated automation ideas inspired by AI Automation Suggester, step-by-step integration tips, sample YAML to adapt, and privacy-minded advice on using local LLMs — everything to help spark your next Get Updates By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.You can unsubscribe anytime.
While none of the suggestions really blew my mind, the integration did generate some ideas that I’m genuinely going to set up in my home.While the provided YAML was fine, it was pretty basic, so I’ll need to build the automations properly myself.The AI did the hard part, however: it came up with some new ideas for automations.
Running locally is the best option if you can Using cloud LLMs isn’t private One significant issue with using the AI Automation Suggester is that if you use a cloud-based LLM, information about your smart home gets sent to third-party servers.This can include entity data, including names and states.This isn’t completely in line with Home Assistant’s focus on privacy and local control.
If you have the hardware to run a decent local LLM, then using one of the local integrations, such as Ollama, is definitely a better option.You can still get useful suggestions, but without having to share information about your smart home with anyone else.A useful tool if you’re stuck for inspiration While none of the generated suggestions were things I could never have thought of for myself, the AI Automation Suggester did come up with some useful ideas that I don’t currently have set up.
If you’re stuck for inspiration, it may be worth giving it a try.
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