Conversations: Areas only available if they contain exposed entities

[j9brown]

Feedback

While creating custom sentences according to the documentation, I found myself stumped when my sentences that contained the <area> token failed to be parsed as expected.

It turns out that the list of areas is only populated with the areas of entities that are exposed to the voice assistant. If an area does not contain any exposed entities then it will not be included in the list.

I feel that this behavior should be documented clearly somewhere because the existing documentation gives the impression that the {area} list (and thus the <area> expansion rule) contains all areas and that's not the case. It only contains exposed areas.

Further reinforcing my mistaken assumption about this list was the fact that the Area UI contains a field for "assist aliases" but it doesn't have a field for whether it is exposed to the assistant (unlike entities) so it seemed they would all be exposed. Perhaps this was not intended.

For my use case, I generally don't want to expose entities directly because they are controlled by scenes and other logic governing an area. So to make the assistant available, I need to define sentences to address the area and trigger the desired behavior. Now I know I can't use the area list to drive that.

URL

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/conversation/

Version

2023.9.1

Additional information

No response

[home-assistant[bot]]

Hey there @home-assistant/core, @synesthesiam, mind taking a look at this feedback as it has been labeled with an integration (conversation) you are listed as a code owner for? Thanks!

Code owner commands

Code owners of `conversation` can trigger bot actions by commenting: - `@home-assistant close` Closes the feedback. - `@home-assistant rename Awesome new title` Renames the feedback. - `@home-assistant reopen` Reopen the feedback. - `@home-assistant unassign conversation` Removes the current integration label and assignees on the feedback, add the integration domain after the command.

[github-actions[bot]]

There hasn't been any activity on this issue recently. Due to the high number of incoming GitHub notifications, we have to clean some of the old issues, as many of them have already been resolved. If this issue is still relevant, please let us know by leaving a comment 👍 This issue has now has been marked as stale and will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[j9brown]

This issue is still relevant and affects the ability of conversations to refer to areas without visible entities.