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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/iametron on 2025-07-29 20:28:07+00:00.
One of the main features my wife and I missed when we ditched our Google hubs was being able to ask Google to show us the front door or the driveway, etc. Been thinking about a way to do this with Home Assistant (voice assistant) and realized it’s not hard.
I have it up and running and it works great.
Here is how I did it in case anyone would like to do this as well.
- Add a camera card to your dash near the top of one of your columns. Camera View setting (drop down) should be live.
- Create a Boolean helper and call it whatever you want (ex: Front Door Camera - Dashboard Toggle)
- Go back to the card you created on your dash for the camera and edit the visibility. Entity state -> select the Boolean toggle you created -> state is equal to on. Save.
At this point, your toggle will display and hide the camera based on whether it’s on or off.
- Create an automation using device and select sentence as the trigger. Add the phrases you want to use to show the camera.
Ex: Hey Jarvis, front door camera (this is what I use and it works 100%… don’t put the hey Jarvis in the sentence field)
A few times Jarvis has come back with an error when I try to use a longer phrase. Works 100% if I just say hey Jarvis, front door camera or backyard camera.
For the action, choose turn on Boolean and select your front door dash toggle as the entity. Save.
This is all you have to do to get it to work like Google hubs. However, how do you exit the cameras? This is the next step.
- Create another automation. Select device. Choose sentence again. I added the word exit and under action turn off Boolean and choose the dashboard toggle.
- Optional… create a button on your dashboard underneath the camera that turns off the dashboard toggle manually. Set the visibility for the button so it only appears when the toggle is active. (Entity state again)
At first, I set this up with a delay for two minutes, so the camera would disappear automatically, but when you do this as a voice automation, it actually sets a timer and when the camera toggle is turned off, VA announces “done.” Didn’t like that.
Something I realized after I did this was that I can call up multiple cameras as long as I’ve created the cards and toggles properly. I can view my front door camera and my driveway camera at the same time and exit by either pushing the button or saying exit.