Smarter Automations in Home Assistant Using Choose

In a previous post I talked about how you could use scripts with your Home Assistant automations to add some simple decision logic. But in keeping with the Choose-Your-Own adventure take on building a smart home, Home Assistant gives you another way to accomplish the same thing.

Back in version .113, the Home Assistant team added the “choose” action to automations. This gave us the ability to drop in an if then style of decision logic into the action section of automations.

Prior to this, you had to write the logic out using programming syntax or use a series of scripts as I detailed in the other video.

And you can take advantage of this action right in the Automation panel in Home Assistant which means you can get complex without ever touching a YAML file.

To help visualize how this choose action works, I made a short video walking you through modifying two of my automations to take advantage of this action to reduce the need for multiple automations. Check it out over on YouTube:

Until next time, Automate the Boring Stuff