This morning my kid asked the voice assistant to “Turn off the computers in this house”.
I heard it, thought well that’s a strange request but seems harmless because how is home assistant gonna turn off computers.
Me a little while later, “why is shit broken? What’s happening!”
Turns out dumb me had adguard exposed to the voice assistant, it switched off all the adguard settings including the DNS rewriting that is the cornerstone of many of my self-hosted services.
I’ve since revoked that access.
That seems like a major bug if it thought DNS settings were a computer.
It’s an LLM that has access to run commands. It’s a major bug by design 😅. But it does do a decent job if I keep tweaking after thing kind of thing happens.
Without the LLM you have to phrase things very specifically, or it will say it doesn’t understand. With the LLM the kids can do things like ask for “the song that goes [lyrics here]” and it can play it. It’s a very cool thing to play with, e.g. “can you tell me what the weather will be like today, phrased as a haiku”, but it’s full of traps as well. I have a “Home Assistant Voice Preview”, the “Preview” bit is to make it clear this is not ready for the general public yet 🙂
P.S. if you’re wondering, the weather today:
Showers grace the sky,
Rain will fall, then clear away,
Gentle winds will sigh.