this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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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 ~~have~~ used 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.
Instead, use a UPS that has telemetry that you can read back. Bonus: it's a ups
Good point. I am using a UPS now so I'll get rid of the smart plug.
I'm using a UPS now so I'll get rid of the smart plug. I've been using it for three years and haven't had issues with it cycling though.
My favourite ones are these ones from Sengled: https://a.co/d/9UPGMTZ
I'm in the USA so these are US-style ones. They support 1800W (which is the max for standard US outlets), use Zigbee, and are ETL certified.
I have Meross smart plugs and they don't cycle unexpectedly. They do use older wifi chips though and my Meross garage door opener has issues staying connected for some reason . I've not had an issue with their power plugs though, been using them for 3-4 years as well.
There is an HACS addon for Meross to make the calls all local. I haven't messed with it too much but it does work. The issue with my garage door opener is purely an issue with my Ubiquity setup and the fact it's connecting through an exterior wall.
Or syncing with ohmhour, forgetting, removing physical devices and smart strip, later reusing smart strip for aforementioned server, losing your mind every few days when you notice it went down for no reason but no idea why bc nothing in the software you're running is instructing it to do so.
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.
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).
In home assistant every entity has "assist" config, you can remove any entity from assist which in turn will prevent it from being included in "all" assist/voice target.
So you can have a plug for server without worry but need to remove it from assist.
When the voice assistant came out I remember one of my coworkers showing it off to another.
To which the other coworker just said "hey Google, text Mom saying 'you're fat'".
Because of that I've never had any voice tools connected to anything I own.
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:
There’s more I’m sure, but you get the point.
Thanks for the explanation!