Assist - Default Sentences

Home Assistant comes with built-in sentences contributed by the community for dozens of languages. These sentences allow you to:

• Turn entities on and off
  • “turn on the living room light”
  • “turn off ceiling fan”
• Open and close covers
  • “Close the garage door”
  • “Open kitchen window”
• Set the brightness and color of lights
  • “Change kitchen lights brightness to 50%”
  • “Set bed light to green”

In addition to individual entities, commands can target areas:

• “turn on all lights in the living room”
• “open windows in the kitchen”
• “change kitchen brightness to 50%”
• “set bedroom lights to green”

Entity aliases are also matched so multiple names can be used, even in different languages.

You can extend the built-in sentences or add your own to trigger any action in Home Assistant.

View existing sentences

Broadly speaking, you can use your voice to turn things on or off, inquire about a state, or change the brightness or color of a light.

If the voice assistant doesn’t understand you, you may need to rephrase your sentence a bit. To get an idea of the specific sentences that are supported for your language, you can do the following:

1. Take a look at the test sentences:

   • On github, in the tests folder, open the subfolder for your language.

   • Look through the test files to see the example sentences that have been tested.

   • The second part of the file name shows the intentIntent is a term used with voice assistants. The intent is what Home Assistant thinks you want it to do when it extracts a command from your voice or text utterance.
     [Learn more], the first part shows the domain. For some domains, such as covers, fans, and light, there are specific sentences. The other domains are covered by the generic homeassistant_.

   • The screenshot below shows sentences used to test the command to turn on the lights. Note that Living room here is just a place holder. It could be any area that you have in your home.

2. View the sentence definition:

   • On github, in the tests folder, open the subfolder for your language.

   • Open the file of interest.

     • () mean alternative elements.
     • [] mean optional elements.
     • <> mean an expansion rule. The view these rules, search for expansion_rules in the _common.yaml file.
     • The syntax is explained in detail in the template sentence syntax documentation.