I have a VeraLite, and I have an iPhone (with Siri). Though there are great apps for the iPhone that allow me to control Vera, they can be quite annoying to have to access just to run a simple scene or control a light.
Just by chance I happened upon the awesome SiriProxy program that would allow me to control Vera through Siri. I was hoping that somebody else would write a nice plugin like this so that I could just install and run it, but after the better part of a year (since I learned about SiriProxy), I couldn't find anything. So I decided to write one myself.
This plugin, at least in it's current iteration, allows for control of four things and four things only:
- Scenes
- Binary Lights
- Dimmable Lights
- Alarm Systems (arming only)
The plugin automatically fetches each of the devices and scenes of these kinds and makes them available.
No, the plugin does not yet control thermostats, but I (or another contributor) might add this down the road.
Once the plugin is installed and the server is running you can ask it to do several things. Here's the list of what it is listening for.
**To run a scene**
You: "Set scene <scene name>" or "Set <scene name>" or "Set scene to <scene name>"
Siri: "Running scene <scene name>"
**To change the brightness of a dimmer**
You: "Change <dimmable light name>" or "Change the <dimmable light name>" or "Change the brightness of the <dimmable light name>"
Siri: "To what should I change <dimmable light name> to?"
You: "50"
Siri: "Turning <dimmable light name> to 50 percent."
**To turn on/off a light switch**
You: "Turn on the <light name>"
Siri: "Turning <light name> on."
**Setting alarm system into away mode.**
You: "I am leaving" or "We are leaving"
Siri: "Okay, I'll prepare the house for you."
**Setting alarm system into home mode.**
You: "I am staying in" or "We are staying in"
Siri: "Okay, I will arm the house for you."
**Setting alarm system into night mode.**
You: "I am going to sleep" or "We are going to sleep"
Siri: "Okay, I will prepare the house for you. Goodnight and sweet dreams!"
**To reload the configuration changes from Vera (such as if you change the name of a scene or device.**
You: "Reload device information"
Siri: "Okay, I have reloaded the configuration from Vera."
**Asking how many scenes Siri knows about (for testing purposes)**
You: "How many scenes do you know?"
Siri: "I know about <number of scenes> scenes.
This installation assumes that you already have SiriProxy installed. If you do not, please visit the SiriProxy page and go through the nicely written guides there to set things up.
To install SiriProxy-Vera into your SiriProxy server, please perform the following steps.
-
Add the following information to your installation's config.yml file:
- name: 'Vera' git: 'git://github.com/andrewgarfield/siriproxy-vera.git' vera_ip: 'vera' # enter the ip or hostname for your vera vera_port: '3480'
-
Change the "vera_ip" option within the stuff you just pasted into config.yml to the IP address or hostname of your vera unit.
vera_ip: '192.168.1.56' -
Update your SiriProxy installation
rvmsudo siriproxy update -
Start the SiriProxy server
rvmsudo siriproxy server -u nobody
If the plugin is installed correctly you will see a message like this as the server starts up:
"Vera plugin running. Detected 20 scenes, 4 dimmable lights, and 7 binary lights."
Do you plan on adding thermostat control to this plugin?
Yes, eventually. It really depends on how much I really feel like I'm missing this particular feature in when it'll be done. Usually my thermostat is controlled by certain scenes triggered by my alarm system, so I don't generally need the ability to change my thermostat manually. Feel free to add it yourself and contribute it back though!
When I say "fifty" to Siri to set my dimmable light, it recognizes it as "fifty" and not "50". Then the action doesn't run. What gives?
This is a limitation of Siri, and SiriProxy in general in how it parses those words. Instead of saying "fifty" trying saying each number (5-0) in rapid succession. Siri should then parse it in numbers.
I do hope to eventually add in gems that can make the english to number conversion for us, but I haven't had the time to explore this yet.
Why is setting a dimmable light a two step process?
You can look back at my commit history to see all of the permutations of english words I put together in order to try to make this work in a single sentence. However, thanks to the regex I used, and Siri's language parsing alghorithms I couldn't find a good way to say it in English that worked regularly.
The biggest issue is that in English we usually tell someone to set something "to 50". Since we must spell out "5-0" individually, Siri takes this as we are trying to tell it to set something "250", making 'to" into the number '2".
Changing it the way I did really helped the reliability, at least with how I speak.
Siri is interpreting things that I say in a weird way. Can we fix this?
We might be able to. For example, when I talk to Siri and tell it to "Set Scene Home Mode", it often interprets the word "scene" also as "seen" and "seem". This is annoying. However, I was able to set the listener to accept all three of those words. Now "Set seem Home Mode" works the same as "Set seen Home Mode". However, this may not be doable in all cases.
Can I just tell Siri to turn a dimmable light on/off instead of having to set its brightness to 100?"
Yes! I wrote this specifically into the code for these functions. Since dimmable lights also can be told to simply turn off and on, I made sure this plugin would treat it the same as regular binary lights in this context.
I added/deleted/changed a scene or device on my Vera. How do I get the plugin to pick up the changes?
That's very easy! All you have to do is tell Siri to "Reload device information". It'll pick up any configuration changes from your vera!
I cannot set certain scenes because I cannot pronounce them in a way that Siri will understand. What can I do?
I had this on a few of my scenes as well. I had a few scenes that my wife ran in stages as she put my daughter to bed. They were called something like "Stage II - Mia Sleep". I wouldn't even know how to speak that in a way the plugin would understand.
The solution? Make your scene names less complicated. I suggest using no more than 2-3 word names. While you're at it, you should probably rename all your scenes into a more speech-friendly way. SiriProxy and this plugin can not guess what you meant to say, it has to be an exact match to the name of a scene or device in order for it to make the connections.
Why won't siriproxy-vera allow me to disarm my alarm panel?
I decided that it wasn't the best security practice to allow voice control over disarming the alarm panel. If it did, anyone with your phone could just simply talk into siri to disarm your whole security system.
If you really want to add this functionality, you can copy one of the existing functions to arm the systems, and replace the values with those to allow for disarming. Shouldn't be too hard, honestly.
I have an alarm panel, why won't siriproxy-vera let me use it?
Sorry about that. The only alarm system I can test with is my own (a Honeywell Vista alarm panel). I am not able to test on any other systems simply because I don't have any other systems.
That being said, I'm pretty sure most of the alarm panel specifications are standardized, and i did my best to write to the standard. Siriproxy-vera identifies a device by it's categorization number of 23, which should be for an alarm partition. It then scans the services available to identify the right service ID to perform actions on.
If I failed to write to the standard, or your vera's alarm panel plugin wasn't written to specification this won't work. Please let me know of this so I can try to fix it.
I have several alarm partitions, but siriproxy-vera only finds one. What's the deal?
Unfortunately there is only limited support for alarm systems at the moment. And part of that initial support is that it finds a single partition (whichever it locates first) and uses it. Since I only have a single partition alarm it was really the only way for me to code in initial support. I'd love to hear your feedback though on how to enhance this functionality.
It's nice that siriproxy-vera will arm my alarm system, but how do I get it to run scenes as well?
The best way to implement this is to create a scene (or scenes) that respond to your alarm system's triggers.
For example, I have scenes that get triggered with the alarm goes into "ExitDelay" that turn on certain lights near doorways for us to see as we exit the house. Then when the alarm switches to "Away" (or technically "Armed") mode, it triggers scenes to turn off all the ligths in the house and raise the thermostat.
But each of these scenes are triggered by the alarm panel itself and not siriproxy-vera. These scenes and triggers would fire the same if I manually armed the system or if I used siriproxy-vera.
Discussion and support for this plugin is provided at the micasaverde forums. Please feel free to make an account and ask questions!
Here's the thread discussions: http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,16081.0.html
kreynold's ruby-mios gem - This gem is NOT used in this plugin, nor did I directly lift any code from it. I did however take a look at it to see how the developer made some of the calls to Vera and parsed how it came out. Doing so saved me a decent amount of time. So credit where credit is due.
I want to thank my daughter Mia who slept so soundly as I was coding this up.
This software is licensed under the MIT license.
Copyright (C) 2013 Andrew Garfield
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