Voice¶

Several voice assistants have specific support, in addition to what can be done for any Home Assistant Notify Entity.

See the transport pages for lots of features and tuning for using these, such as auto-pausing music, using vendor-native groups for faster parallel notifications and more.

Recipes¶

Several recipes feature voice notifications:

Simplifying Text¶

Voice notifications can sound awful when a device like an Alexa Echo starts reading out web URLs, special symbols or punctuation.

By default, when using a voice aware transport, the notification will be simplified to strip out URLs (where beginning with a scheme like https:) and Unicode characters in any of these categories:

Replace with space
_ (underscore)
Remove Common Symbols
( and )
$ and £
< and >
Remove Unicode Symbols
Sc - Symbol, currency (e.g. €, ¥)
So — Symbol, other (e.g. ✓, ★, emoji, ©, ®)
Sk — Symbol, modifier (e.g. ^, ¨, spacing modifier letters)
Sm — Symbol, math (e.g. +, =, ×, ∑)
Mn — Mark, nonspacing (combining accents/diacritics, e.g. the ́ in é when decomposed)

SSML will be left intact for all transports identified as SPOKEN, so instructions to whisper, shout or play chimes won't be affected.

This all means that a single notification can be sent for multiple purposes, with more details on mobile push or email and a suitable announcement on voice assistants.

This can be switched on or off for any delivery:

delivery:
  apple_push:
    transport: mobile_push
    options:
      simplify_text: false
      strip_urls: true

Overriding Message¶

If the text simplification isn't enough, you can also craft a specific message for voice assistants.

  - action: supernotify.notify
    data:
        message: Somebody has triggered the motion detector at the front porch
        spoken_message: Porch Alert

or use the generic delivery overrides

  - action: supernotify.notify
    data:
        message: Somebody has triggered the motion detector at the front porch
        delivery:
          mobile_push:
              message: Someone at the back door
          alexa_devices_announce_all:
              message: Porch Alert

There are also options to combine the title into the message, or drop it out altogether that may work better for you

  - action: supernotify.notify
    data:
        title: Home Security
        message: Somebody has triggered the motion detector at the front porch
        # any transport, like a voice assistant, that only looks at `message` will prefix
        # the message with the title. Alternatively, `use_title` uses only the title
        message_usage: combine_title

Noises¶

While SSML can add a variety of sounds to voice assistants, the best way to use them is with the Chime transport, which can also be used to unify Alexas making red alert noises with real sirens and doorbell chimes to make as much racket as you need.