homeassistant-assist

What This Skill Does

The homeassistant-assist skill acts as a direct bridge between your OpenClaw AI agent and your local Home Assistant instance. By leveraging the Assist (Conversation) API, it transforms your agent into a powerful smart home controller. Instead of forcing you to build complex logic for every single entity, this skill passes user requests directly to Home Assistant's native Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engine. It handles intent parsing, fuzzy entity matching, and execution of complex scenes or device states entirely within your Home Assistant ecosystem. It follows a 'fire and forget' philosophy: you translate the user's intent into a string, send it to the API, and relay the human-readable confirmation provided by Assist back to the user.

Installation

To get started, you must first generate a Long-Lived Access Token in Home Assistant by navigating to Profile -> Long-Lived Access Tokens. Once generated, add the following to your OpenClaw environment configuration:

{
  "env": {
    "HASS_SERVER": "https://your-homeassistant-url",
    "HASS_TOKEN": "your-long-lived-access-token"
  }
}

Finally, install the skill via the command line using clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/getmolty/homeassistant-assistiq. Ensure your server is accessible to the agent and that the credentials provided have appropriate permissions to invoke services.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for any scenario involving IoT interaction. Whether you are managing home security (locking doors, arming alarm systems), environmental control (setting thermostat temperatures, humidity levels), or multimedia (playing music on speakers, turning on TVs), this skill provides a unified interface. It is particularly effective for users who have customized their Home Assistant setups with complex aliases and areas, as it relies on your existing configuration to resolve vague user requests.

Example Prompts

1. "Turn off all the lights in the living room and set the thermostat to 72 degrees."
2. "Did I leave the garage door open?"
3. "Start the vacuum cleaner in the kitchen and play some jazz music on the basement speakers."

Tips & Limitations

To maximize effectiveness, ensure your Home Assistant entities are well-named and include aliases where necessary. If Assist reports an error, it is rarely an issue with the skill itself; rather, it indicates that Home Assistant's NLU could not map the input to a known target. Treat these as opportunities to refine your HA config (e.g., renaming a confusing entity or adding a missing alias) rather than trying to patch the agent's logic. Remember, the skill is a pass-through—keep it simple and rely on Assist to handle the heavy lifting of state management.