Before I start, a note about the title. Somehow I started these post out of step where I am calling it the current month but give the update on the previous. Let me stop doing that and make a bit more sense. From here out the updates will include everything that has happened from the previous post to the current one.

September brought us a ton of behind the scenes changes. Work was mainly done on the timers, alarms and reminders automation which is now in beta testing. This automation is huge (~500 lines of code) and complicated but it works and has been given good reviews from the testers. We hope to have this released soon but some work still needs to be done to tidy things up and to reuse this code for other automations. Hint: "play the sound machine for an hour"

In addition, the thermostat control automation and video was released. Now we're living in comfort!!

One of the biggest advances was the new wiki which was finally put in place. Thanks again to @theonecubed for getting this set propped up. We now have a much better way to present the View Assist documentation. Not only that, this makes it much easier for users to contribute by making edits to the wiki. Now everyone can contribute even if it is just fixing gramatical errors or making things easier to understand.

Also in huge news, we now have a community contributions section. This will be user submission and user supported blueprints, scripts, views and tips and hints that extend View Assist even further. These are things that don't fit in the core but provide specialized functionality. You will love it! Thanks to Flight-Lab/flab for the first contribution!

On the social front, we continue to increase our Youtube subscribers and recently crossed over the 400 subscriber mark! Our Discord server has continued to flourish with everyone helping each other. The level of interaction and work being done on this project has exceeded expectation month over month. You guys are fantastic!

August brought us a ton of changes and lots more custom sentences. Some of the highlights were:

• Browse your favorite website on your View Assist Satellite
• Search Wikipedia using voice
• Use AI to do searches
• Get sports scores from US major sports teams
• Get accurate estimated travel times using Waze

With these, the addition addition of pyscript has opened a lot of new avenues for improvement. A long outstanding request for my personal use as well as user request is the addition of timers. I am happy to say that I now have timers working on my dev system! This timer system will allow users to not only set timers but also alarms and reminders. Additionally, I am sure that this can be extended further to allow users to do things like 'play sound machine for 20 minutes'. Exciting times ahead.

On the social front, we continue to increase our Youtube subscribers and recently crossed over to 200 Discord members. This is fantastic and the community is really showing up to not only help each other but also to contribute. User theonecubed has put in some hardwork to get the framework done for the View Assist wiki move from Github over to Docusarus. This will prove to be most beneficial as other users will now be able to contribute via Github pull requests. Everyone is encouraged to participate with wiki updates.

It's been a while since the last update but this is not due to lack of activity. Things are really coming together and the wish list items have been getting checked off regularly. We are making great strides and several users including myself have been able to put these devices into daily use in replacement of their commercial voice assistants. Things are not perfect but they are definitely getting better daily with the help of a bunch of different folks making contributions and offering guidance. It is greatly appreciated and I am excited to see where we will be in the coming months.

Our rollout for core functionality has been completed and I am happy to report that the number of users using View Assist is growing every day. Our Discord server continues to offer great support on both the hardware side (TSV in particular), troubleshooting, and development. We are currently working on additional functionality through additional views and custom sentence blueprints. Stay tuned for more!

We are closing in on complete roll out with only a few more items needing to be sorted. I am pleased to say that support for the project is fantastic with a good number of folks helping out on Discord. We are growing in number of both Discord users and Youtube subscribers which gives the project more visibility and the number of people lending a hand is growing in turn. The goal is to have everything rolled out and start pumping out custom sentences and views to expand the capabilities of View Assist.

Things are pretty crazy with work and life events but these should settle down next week. Despite this I have managed to release a few videos. I'll be honest, I am not in this to make flashy Youtube videos with cool WLED lighting. What you see is what you get. I am here to help others set up View Assist and to build a foundation for easy to share, expandable functionality for Assist with all satellites being able to operate both as a group and individually. The videos are one shot recordings and there will be hiccups but I'll do my best to address anything needing to be corrected in the comments and here on the wiki. The videos are really a means to provide additional context to the wiki.

If you haven't checked out the Youtube channel please take a look and, not to sound cliché, like, subscribe, and comment as this will help draw a larger audience and perhaps some other contributors.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm1i3EkmUwsQnrbq_Sr37jw

All videos and wiki pages are now available for creating the Assist satellite devices using Stream Assist for wake word detection. At present, someone should be able to go through the wiki and/or Youtube videos and install the components necessary to create a device that will listen for wake word and then action and respond. Next steps are underway for tying these devices into the View Assist system. The first video for this was uploaded today with a few more to follow before the complete View Assist configuration series is complete. We have some good folks beta testing VA on the Discord channel and it is fantastic to see them get their VA system running and the excitement that follows. More good stuff coming soon.

Decided that it may be wise to include some status updates as if you look at the file upload dates it appears that the project is not active. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As it stands now, some major enhancements have been implemented. Some of these include:

• Ability to control displays individually
• Modes have been enabled as well as do not disturb
• Ability to include voice only satellites both with onboard wake word (eg ESP32) and with HA handling the wake words (eg anything using Stream Assist)
• Additional custom sentences for media playback, volume control, weather forecast, shopping list, setting alarms and reminders, and others

The delay in posting is due to the need to tighten things up and reduce the amount of effort required for users to implement and to better handle errors. I have made a lot of progress on this front and hope that I will be able to release the enhanced version soon