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.
A while back, I saw a story in the Home Assistant Facebook group about someone’s child saying “Hey Google, turn on everything” and it messing things up. I was telling the story to my wife and forgot to replace “Hey Google” with something Google wouldn’t pick up on. Oops. It heard my “turn on everything” and chaos ensued. I have some Zigbee alarms that all started sounding. It enabled several different scenes and ran several scripts. All TVs turned on. My Xbox and Nvidia Shield were fighting for control of the TV (there’s some issue with HDMI-CEC that I haven’t figured out where if both are on, they get stuck in a loop changing the TV input between HDMI2 and HDMI3 about once per second).
Don’t do that. “Turn off everything” is bad too. I
haveused to have my server rack plugged into a smart plug to measure power usage, and “turn off everything” turns that off. I want to figure out how to disable these two voice commands.Haha it’s a fine balance between preventing this sort of craziness and having a voice assistant that is actually useful because it can do things.
I want to figure out how to disable these two voice commands, and how to completely disable turning off the smart plug my server rack uses.
In the settings->voice assistants page you can see exposed entities. Review them and remove anything you don’t want it to be able to control.
You can also set up custom commands as an automation. You could probably set up an automation trigger to pick up on the phrases you want to block and respond with “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that” (or something boring).
Open the Google Home app, go to " Automations", and make one for the household for when someone says “turn everything on” and any other variations you want, then just make it respond with something instead of actually doing the thing.
This sounds great until you realize the number of invocations that mean the same thing:
- everything on
- turn on everything
- turn everything on
- switch on everything
- switch everything on
- turn on all devices
There’s more I’m sure, but you get the point.
