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Home Assistant Integration

Home Assistant runs your house; your hive runs your voice. This integration introduces them. Once it's installed, your OVOS device shows up in Home Assistant as a first-class entity — play and pause its audio, nudge the volume, mute the mic, read its status, even power-cycle it — right alongside your lights and thermostats. From HA's side it's just another device on the dashboard; underneath, every button press rides the encrypted HiveMind connection to the OVOS instance and back. It's a manual-install custom integration (hivemind-homeassistant), added like any other from Settings → Devices & Services.

In a nutshell

  • A custom_components/hivemind integration installed by hand, then added via Settings → Devices & Services.
  • Its HiveMind client must have admin privileges and explicit access to a broad set of bus message types.
  • Grant those message types with hivemind-core allow-msg and hivemind-core make-admin, passing the node ID positionally.

Installation

  1. Copy the hivemind folder into your Home Assistant custom_components directory:
mkdir -p /config/custom_components
cp -r custom_components/hivemind /config/custom_components/

  1. Restart Home Assistant.

  2. Add the integration via Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → HiveMind.

Required permissions

This is the one place this integration asks more of you than a chat bridge does — so here's why before the long lists. A bridge only needs to hear speak. This integration actually drives the device: it mutes the mic, reads whether a service is alive, changes the volume, controls playback. Each of those is a distinct bus message, and HiveMind's deny-by-default posture means you have to allow every one you want to use.

You don't have to grant them all — grant the ones behind the controls you care about. The lists below are grouped by the OVOS service each message belongs to, so you can pick whole capabilities at a time (skip the OCP block if you don't need media controls, skip the PHAL blocks if you don't need volume or power). This client also needs the admin flag.

ovos-core

mycroft.stop
mycroft.skills.is_alive
mycroft.skills.is_ready

ovos-dinkum-listener

mycroft.voice.is_alive
mycroft.voice.is_ready
mycroft.mic.listen
mycroft.mic.mute
mycroft.mic.unmute
mycroft.mic.get_status
recognizer_loop:sleep
recognizer_loop:wake_up
recognizer_loop:awoken
recognizer_loop:state.get
recognizer_loop:state.set

ovos-gui

mycroft.gui_service.is_alive
mycroft.gui_service.is_ready

ovos-audio

speak
mycroft.audio.is_alive
mycroft.audio.is_ready
mycroft.audio.is_speaking
mycroft.audio.speak.status

Readiness and speaking probes

The integration polls each service over its device type with mycroft.<service>.is_alive / mycroft.<service>.is_ready readiness probes — the <service> is one of skills, voice, gui_service, audio, or PHAL, depending on whether the device is registered as a voice assistant or a media player. The Speaking sensor additionally tracks mycroft.audio.is_speaking, so make sure that message type is allowed for the audio service.

OCP (OpenVoiceOS Common Play)

ovos.common_play.player.status
ovos.common_play.track_info
ovos.common_play.get_track_length
ovos.common_play.get_track_position
ovos.common_play.playlist.queue
ovos.common_play.resume
ovos.common_play.pause
ovos.common_play.stop
ovos.common_play.previous
ovos.common_play.next
ovos.common_play.set_track_position
ovos.common_play.playlist.clear
ovos.common_play.shuffle.set
ovos.common_play.shuffle.unset
ovos.common_play.repeat.set
ovos.common_play.repeat.unset
ovos.common_play.repeat.one

Audio Service

(only if enabled manually — for systems without the OCP Audio Plugin)

mycroft.audio.service.play
mycroft.audio.service.resume
mycroft.audio.service.pause
mycroft.audio.service.stop
mycroft.audio.service.prev
mycroft.audio.service.next
mycroft.audio.service.set_track_position

PHAL

mycroft.phal.is_alive
mycroft.phal.is_ready

ovos-phal-plugin-alsa

mycroft.volume.get
mycroft.volume.set
mycroft.volume.increase
mycroft.volume.decrease
mycroft.volume.mute
mycroft.volume.unmute

ovos-phal-plugin-system

system.reboot
system.shutdown
system.mycroft.service.restart
system.ssh.status
system.ssh.enable
system.ssh.disable

ovos-phal-plugin-camera

(work in progress)

ovos.phal.camera.ping
ovos.phal.camera.get
ovos.phal.camera.open
ovos.phal.camera.close

However many of those you decided you need, you grant them the same way — one allow-msg per message type, then the admin flag once at the end (the node ID goes last, positionally):

hivemind-core allow-msg "speak" <id>
hivemind-core allow-msg "mycroft.volume.get" <id>
# ... repeat for each message type
hivemind-core make-admin <id>

Source

Validated against the HiveMind source: