In Home Assistant 2023.7 a feature was added to allow services to provide a response.
This release brings in a change to Home Assistant, which we consider to be one of the biggest game changers of the past years: Services can now respond with data! 🤯
It is such a fundamental change, which will allow for many new use cases and opens the gates for endless possibilities.
In this release the functionality has only been enabled for a couple of services, but I’m having trouble picturing what we can use this for now and in the future.
What are some use cases you can think of on how to use this new feature?
There was a really cool blueprint released which uses this. Basically, it asks for your calendar entries for the day, include those and weather info etc. in a prompt to e.g. chatGPT, asking for a summary, and then sends this reply as a notification to your phone.
Scripts can also return information now, allowing for cleaner scripts and automations theough Separation of Concern. For example; I sometimes want to turn on lights to a set brightness depending on the time of day, and now I can make a script to calculate the correct level that I then use in all automations. This eliminates the slight delay you get with e.g. f.lux or Adaptive Lighting.