Skip to content

Part 4 — Home Assistant, the Works

Goal: Enable HA automations with Kenzy and replace HA Assist with the Kenzy backend.

Make sure you've got a working integration with Home Assistant first from Part 3.

Note: These three pieces are independent — do any of them, in any order. This is the "advanced" tier only in the sense that each one crosses between systems; none of them is long.

1. Use Kenzy's nodes in HA Automations

The MQTT bridge surfaces every Kenzy room node as an HA device — state sensors (idle/listening/speaking), who spoke last, mute switches, trigger buttons — so your automations can react to Kenzy and command her:

  • "When the doorbell rings, chime in every room" (kenzy/chime)
  • "When the movie starts, mute the living-room node"
  • A dashboard card showing which rooms are listening right now

Setup (an MQTT broker, two config keys) is in Integrations → Home Assistant. Entities appear via MQTT discovery — no HA-side configuration at all.

2. Kenzy on your phone

Install the kenzy-hass integration — via HACS, the one piece of Part 4 that needs it — and pick Kenzy as your voice assistant's conversation agent — then map each household member to their HA login on the People tab so phone requests arrive as them.

The complete walkthrough is On Your Phone — install, mapping, and what to expect ("set a timer" asks which room; "remind me in 10 minutes in the office" is one shot).

✓ Checkpoint

Ask Assist on your phone: "what's your name?" → "I'm Kenzy." Then: "what do you know about my locker?" → your fact from Part 2, because the phone knows it's you.

3. Her voice and ears in the HA pipeline

Two switches make a spoken phone conversation Kenzy end to end — her speech recognition transcribing, her voice answering:

  1. Kenzy dashboard → Services → tts and stt → set wyoming.enabled: true on each, save (the services restart themselves).
  2. HA → Add Integration → Wyoming Protocol (built into HA — no HACS for this one) — once for port 10200 (voice) and once for 10300 (ears). Both appear as kenzy.
  3. In your voice assistant's pipeline, select kenzy for Text-to-speech and Speech-to-text.

If HA runs on a different machine than the Kenzy services, the services must be reachable from it — the On Your Phone page covers the bind setting and the (deliberate) security posture.

You made it! Great Job.

Now dig deeper into what you can do with Kenzy: