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Part 3 — Home Assistant Basics

Goal: If you are using Home Assistant then you can have Kenzy control your devices with your voice commands.

Note: Make sure you have completed the prerequisite in Part 1

Kenzy reads your device inventory live from HA — names, rooms, floors. While there's no required device list to maintain on the Kenzy side, you can add notes about devices to help Kenzy better understand your home. You can add things like "The floor lamp beside the chair" for example as context to help Kenzy determine the device that best matches your voice command.

1. Create a Home Assistant access token

Kenzy authenticates to HA with a long-lived access token — a key you create once, in your HA user profile:

  1. Open Home Assistant and click your user initials (bottom-left of the sidebar) to open your profile.
  2. Go to the Security tab and scroll to Long-lived access tokens.
  3. Click Create token, name it kenzy, and click OK.
  4. Copy the token now — HA shows it exactly once. If you lose it, delete it and create another; nothing breaks.

Use an account that can see your devices

The token inherits the permissions of the HA user who creates it. A normal admin account is fine.

2. Give the token to Kenzy

In the Kenzy dashboard: Settings → API keys → set HA_API_KEY to the token you copied. Then tell Kenzy where HA lives, in the LLM service's config (Services → llm in the dashboard, or configs/services/llm.yaml):

HA URL Config

skills:
  home_assistant:
    url: "http://homeassistant.local:8123"   # your HA address

Save your settings and then Restart the LLM service (Services → llm → Restart) so it picks both up. The default url already says homeassistant.local:8123 — if that's where your HA answers, the token alone is enough.

✓ Checkpoint

The dashboard's Home Assistant tab now shows your device tree — every area and entity Kenzy can hear about. If it says HA is unreachable, check the URL (try your HA's IP address instead of .local) and that the token was saved.

3. Talk to your house

"Hey Kenzie… turn off the office lights"

"Hey Kenzie… set the bedroom to 72"

"Hey Kenzie… is the garage door open?"

Room awareness is automatic: in the kitchen, "turn on the lights" means the kitchen lights. Common commands run on a fast deterministic path (no language model involved — they're instant); anything fuzzier falls through to the model, which has the same device controls as tools.

If you use HA's to-do lists, they work by voice too — "add milk to the shopping list" — and show up on everyone's phone via the HA companion app.

✓ Checkpoint

Lights respond by voice, and the Activity tab shows the commands with a ⚡ fast-path tag.

4. When a device answers to the wrong name

Two minutes of curation fixes most annoyances, from the dashboard's Home Assistant tab: give a device a spoken alias ("the big lamp"), exclude things that shouldn't be voice-targets (a smart-plug status LED that shows up as a light), or set a room's defaults (what "the lights" means in that room). Details: Home Assistant skill.

Continue to Part 4 — Home Assistant, the Works — Kenzy on your phone, in her own voice, and Kenzy's rooms appearing inside HA.