December came and went with a blur. As expected, things did slow down due to holiday commitments and time off with family. Despite this, we still managed to get some work done. Most notably is the dashboard 2.0 release which really lays a great foundatation for things moving forward. We also worked through a change made by the Home Assistant folks that caused our satellite devices to listen for a much shorter time. The good news is that the HA folks are great and worked with us to get things back in order for the 2025.1 release.

Recently we saw a dashboard commit by @minicom that allowed for Wyoming and ESPHome devices to interact with the dashboard. I'm excited to see how incorporating these new satellite devices will broaden our options for satellite devices.

January will hopefully be packed with the usual goodness and advances we have all come to enjoy. Here's to kicking off 2025 with some additional functionality and coolness for View Assist!

Well here we are already moving towards the end of the November. Huge news to share in that the Alarms Reminders & Timers has finally been released. This was the biggest undertaking short of the initial work done on View Assist. This blueprint is massive at over 500 lines of code. These timers were requested by many including myself and should make it that much easier to switch from your current commercial voice assistant over to Home Assistant Assist!

On top of that, we are putting the finishing touches on the revamped dashboard. This has been a huge undertaking as well and I want to thank @JimmyJamesBob and @flab their work on this rework as well as the folks who helped with the beta testing. The release should happen very soon. Some of the new features include:

• The new blueprint offloads some of the work previously done by hardcoded values in the dashboard. Things like the View Assist group, weather entity, and 24 hour clock preference are now handled within. This will allow for more customization per VA satellite
• Visually the user now has the option to set a different default background image per device
• A new Assist prompt called 'blur pop up' is now the default. This popup happens when you say the wake word. The old Assist bar is still available for those who would like to continue using it
• Many of the values that were required in the VA device config are now customizable from the blueprint. These include mode, view timeout, do not disturb and others. They can be removed from the VA device config when you like. This is not a breaking change. See the new minimum standard VA device config here
• Icon size and font style is now selectable through the blueprint. This will allow for even more customization
• We are introducing 'launch icons' which will act as shortcut buttons to your cutom tasks. This can be to switch to camera views, turn on/off lights, etc. These are tied to action calls and can be added as a persistent icon for these functions
• Changes in CSS now allow for better placement of elements and better use of space. The shifting of elements when icons appear/disappear has finally been resolved!
• User now has an option to use either Stream Assist or HassMic inputs. We will be adding other types in the future

And last but definitely not least, @Jeff has been killing it with his work on HassMic. While his efforts are part of a separate project, he has worked closely with us to make integration easy. HassMic will be the recommended microphone AND mediaplayer for View Assist as soon as it is out of beta which also won't be very long. Some of us have been using it for many weeks now as the replacement for the microphone apps we have listed on the wiki and it is MUCH more robust, responsive and easy to use. It is probably worth your while to switch over now even while in beta. Awesome work Jeff!

As we draw close to the end of the first year of View Assist I look back at the progress made and it is substantial. I could not be happier to hear folks saying they've ditched Alexa/Google Home in favor of Assist. This work was done by the team and each and every one of you have contributed in one way or another. I'm looking forward to future growth as we add more functionality and refine what we currently have. Please reach out on Discord with any ideas and suggestions.

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