Tasker integration

[xvello]

As we want to keep the project's scope limited, it would be good to open an "escape hatch" for users to implement features we don't want to support. As discussed in #30 (comment), Tasker is a popular application in the home automation sphere, and a good fit for the intended voice satellite use case. Here are several that could be relevant:

State plugins

• Ava Activity: triggers on voice activity and/or timer activity: tasker: Ava Activity state plugin #65
  • Turn the screen on / turn on brightness / pause music app when the wake word is detected
  • Bring Ava to the foreground when a timer starts
  • Run actions when a timer is ringing

Event plugins

Relatively easy to implement:

• Event on EspHomeState value changes: can be used to differentiate between "Listening" and "Replying" phases more reliably than through a state

Action plugins

We'd need internal changes to allow these actions from a Tasker singleton

• Trigger listening state without a wake word tasker: "wake up" and "stop ringing" actions #70
• Stop timer alarm tasker: "wake up" and "stop ringing" actions #70

Let's discuss other use cases below.

[ashetl]

For my use case, the two intents that I think would be helpful to broadcast are:

• listening state (as discussed in Speech-to-phrase compatibility #30); and
• home assistant media player state.

The media player state does not currently appear on the Ava UI, but I assume Ava is aware of when the satellite is being used as media player(?)

I poll HA to get the media player state so that I can have a single Tasker widget on my homescreen:

• if any media is currently playing, tapping the widget will stop the media - very handy because I'm unable to give voice commands while media is being played; or
• if no media is currently playing, tapping the widget will play my usual radio station - just because it's sometimes easier to tap than ask for the radio to play.

I hadn't tried timers, but after reading your comment I tried setting a timer and discovered happily that it worked without configuration. I can't think of a reason to use timers in my use case but I'm new to HA, so there's perhaps a lot of functionality available that I am not yet aware of.

[ashetl]

Tinkering more, I wonder whether there could also be any benefit from enabling Ava to receive broadcast intents.

Options that come to mind are as follows:

1. For when the Android device is within close range, it might be helpful sometimes to have a button (e.g. Tasker widget) to press that sets the satellite state to "listening" instead of the wake word. For what it's worth, I'm not suggesting I have experienced any issues with wake word sensitivity, just that there are some situations in which it might be desirable to minimise the necessary utterances to minimise disturbance to others.
2. Having experimented more with the timers (and discovered that the other user in my household might find them helpful), I'm wondering whether there might be an intent that could stop the timer chime with a single press from the home screen, instead of opening up the Ava app and stopping it manually from within the Ava UI. I'm still looking, but haven't yet found a way to do this with a Home Assistant webhook.

[xvello]

@ashetl good points, I updated the issue to list these possible actions, and opened #65 for the first item

About timers, I setup Ava with a longer alarm ringtone and disabled alarm repeat: this is enough for timers I can miss, and the timers I cannot miss are on my phone instead. A Tasker action to stop the alarm could definitely be done, but would need some internal changes first.

[ashetl]

For what it's worth, the workaround that I'm currently using to stop the timer chime from the home screen for now is to get Tasker to force-stop the Ava app (over adb wifi) and then restart it. I found it necessary to allow a pause (I use 3 seconds) after the app restarts before returning to the home screen, to allow Ava to initialise before being sent to background.

Observed behaviour is that this will stop the chime currently playing, but timers that have not yet completed continue to run despite the app restart.

The caveats I've observed so far are:

• I need to re-run the adb command from another device to start adb -tcpip after any power interruption (as documented in Tasker documentation)
• Any timers that survive the restart no longer appear in the Ava UI after the restart, so they continue to run without any way to know how much longer remains.
• The 3 second flash of Ava UI before returning to the home screen is not the "prettiest" (sorry, - the UI is fine, but does not compare to the photo background that I have on my home screen(!))

[xvello]

@ashetl that's ingenious! Implementing the actions was relatively easy, here's the commit for them. Hopefully we'll merge and release soon.