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Voice control is dangerous
(lemmy.nz)
This morning my kid asked the voice assistant to "Turn off the computers in this house".
I heard it, thought well that's a strange request but seems harmless because how is home assistant gonna turn off computers.
Me a little while later, "why is shit broken? What's happening!"
Turns out dumb me had adguard exposed to the voice assistant, it switched off all the adguard settings including the DNS rewriting that is the cornerstone of many of my self-hosted services.
I've since revoked that access.
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
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.
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.
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.