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🏡 Family & home

Control your smart home by talking to a private AI

Connect Home Assistant to an AI model running on your own computer, then ask in plain words: “turn off everything downstairs” or “is the garage door open?”. Your voice and home data stay at home.

AdvancedUpdated · By BotsDoThat · Added Oct 24, 2026

Seen on Reddit · Hacker News · YouTube ×2 · GitHub · Official docs

What the bot does

  1. Listens to a plain-language request from the Home Assistant app or a voice speaker.
  2. Works out which lights, plugs, locks or sensors you mean.
  3. Controls only the devices you've exposed to it.
  4. Answers questions about your home, like which windows are open.

What you end up with

A voice assistant for your home that understands normal sentences and doesn't send your data to a big tech cloud.

Copy-paste prompt

Fill in the [brackets]. Then paste it into any tool below.

Copy this prompt 
(Use this as the instructions for the Home Assistant conversation agent.) You control my home through Home Assistant. Only use the devices I've exposed. Before unlocking a door, opening the garage or turning off an alarm, ask me to confirm. If you're not sure which device I mean, ask. Keep answers to one short sentence.

New to this? How to build an AI agent without coding, or set up a bot in 5 plain steps →

Setup

  1. Install Home Assistant on a small computer at home (Home Assistant's site has a getting-started guide) and add your smart devices.
  2. Install Ollama on a computer on the same network and download a model.
  3. In Home Assistant go to Settings > Devices & services > Add Integration > Ollama, and enter the Ollama server address.
  4. In the Ollama options, allow it to control Home Assistant, then choose which devices it can see on the exposed entities page.
  5. Set your voice assistant (Assist) to use the Ollama conversation agent, and try a simple request.

Tools that can do it today

Plans and limits change; check each tool's page.

Watch out

  • Home Assistant's docs call device control through Ollama an experimental feature. Expose only the devices you're happy for it to touch.
  • Small local models can misunderstand. Keep locks, alarms and heating behind a confirmation step.
  • A local model needs a reasonably capable computer to answer quickly.

What this costs to run

In a chat app it runs inside your plan. If you run it as a bot on an AI API, the bill depends on how often it runs and how much it reads.

Estimate it in the cost calculator →

Tip: Use a small AI model for simple jobs, a big one for hard ones. More in Run your bots for less and how much an AI agent costs.

Questions people ask

Which AI tools can do this?

Home Assistant or Ollama (local models) can do this today. Paste the copy-paste prompt on this page into any of them and fill in the [brackets].

How hard is it to set up?

It's rated Advanced. Start with the steps under “What the bot does”.

What should I watch out for?

Home Assistant's docs call device control through Ollama an experimental feature. Expose only the devices you're happy for it to touch.

Related

Sources

Last checked Oct 24, 2026. Self-reported results from posts are the poster's own claims.

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