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Voice Assistants

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

  • "How many chores does Malia have left?"
  • "How many stars does Alex have?"
  • "Mark make bed as done for Malia" (v7.0.0)
  • "What's Malia's next job?" (v7.0.0)
  • "How close is Alex to the cinema trip?" (v7.0.0)

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 five 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 intents TaskMate provides:

Intent Answers or does Example
TaskMateChoresLeft How many chores are still to do today "How many chores does Malia have left?"
TaskMatePoints The child's points balance "How many stars does Alex have?"
TaskMateCompleteChore (v7.0.0) Ticks a chore off for the child "Mark make bed as done for Malia"
TaskMateNextChore (v7.0.0) The chore the child should do next "What's Malia's next job?"
TaskMateRewardProgress (v7.0.0) How many more points the child needs for a reward "How close is Alex to the cinema trip?"

The slots in the sentences:

Slot Matches
{child} Any of your children by name (case-insensitive)
{chore} A chore due today. The closest name wins: an exact match first, then one containing what was said, then the most words in common
{reward} A reward the child can claim, matched the same way. Leave it out ("how close is Alex to a reward") and TaskMate picks the cheapest reward the child can't afford yet

Completing a chore by voice

TaskMateCompleteChore counts as the child's own tap, never a parent's:

  • Approval rules apply exactly as if the child had tapped Done. A chore that needs approval goes to the queue ("Done! Make bed is waiting for a grown-up to check it").
  • The linked-account rules decide whether the person speaking may act for that child. If not, Assist says so and nothing is completed.
  • Chores that need a photo, a number (quantity chores), a description, a timer or a team can't be finished by voice. Assist says to do that one on the card.
  • A chore already done today is reported as done rather than completed again.

Replies in your language

Replies are translated. Assist answers in the language the question was asked in, using the same translations as TaskMate's push notifications, so a German question gets a German answer.

Installing the Trigger Sentences

Example sentences ship in the TaskMate repository under custom_sentences/<language>/taskmate.yaml, for these languages:

Code Language
en English
da Danish
de German
fr French
nb Norwegian Bokmål
nn Norwegian Nynorsk
pl Polish
pt Portuguese
pt-BR Portuguese (Brazil)

Copy the file for your language into your Home Assistant config, keeping the same path. For English:

<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.

Upgrading from before v7.0.0? Copy the file again. Older copies used {name} for the child's name, but Home Assistant reserves {name} for device and entity names, so a sentence using it could be answered with "not aware of any device called …" instead of reaching TaskMate. The new files use {child} and add the three new intents. If you wrote your own sentences, change {name} to {child} in them, and rename the name: entry under lists: to child:. TaskMate still accepts {name} from an old file, so nothing breaks in the meantime.

A minimal English file looks like this:

language: "en"
intents:
  TaskMateChoresLeft:
    data:
      - sentences:
          - "how many chores (does|has) {child} have left"
  TaskMateCompleteChore:
    data:
      - sentences:
          - "mark {chore} [as] done for {child}"
  TaskMateNextChore:
    data:
      - sentences:
          - "what('s| is) {child}'s next (job|chore)"
  TaskMateRewardProgress:
    data:
      - sentences:
          - "how close is {child} to [the] {reward}"
lists:
  child:
    wildcard: true
  chore:
    wildcard: true
  reward:
    wildcard: true

Other Languages

For a language not in the list, copy one of the files under the matching language code, for example:

<config>/custom_sentences/es/taskmate.yaml

Then translate only the sentences: lines into that language. Leave the intent names (TaskMateChoresLeft, TaskMatePoints, TaskMateCompleteChore, TaskMateNextChore, TaskMateRewardProgress), the slot names ({child}, {chore}, {reward}) 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