Actionable notifications are the best Home Assistant trick you’re not using, and they changed my smart home

Home Assistant is a fantastic piece of software that I use to automate my home, thanks to a combination of software integrations and physical Zigbee sensors distributed in my home. Over time, I’ve automated more and more in my home, with notifications being a crucial part of that. When my day starts, I get a notification with my first call of the day and what the weather will be like. I also have notifications configured through Home Assistant for when some of my crucial self-hosted services go down, but I recently discovered actionable notifications, and they’ve been incredible.

The difference between actionable notifications and regular notifications is in the name, and it basically just means that on both iOS and Android, you can send a notification with a specific action. I’ve been playing around with it for the last while, and as is always the case when deploying a new piece of tech, I’ve been having more and more ideas of how I can make my smart home even better when combined with my phone.

Actionable notifications open up a world of possibilities

Giving you the choice right on your phone

In the above example, this notification fires when my Zigbee door sensor reports that the door has been opened, and my location is marked as “Away.” I can set off an alarm, or I can tap the “See camera” option, which brings me straight to Frigate. There are more uses too; for example, when my alarm goes off in the morning, and my home server is off, I could create a notification that offers to send a Wake on LAN packet to switch it on.

That’s not all, either. Here are some other uses for actionable notifications, some of which I actually use:

• Offer to log weight and other information when a weighing scale is used
• Offer to restart a Docker container when it’s detected as down
• Offer to turn on the lights in your home after sunset

These are all genuinely useful notifications, and they’re not hard to create either. For more complex setups, such as Frigate, there are even publicly available blueprints that turn the entire process into a simple step-by-step setup, where you just click various options to get exactly what you want in a notification. All you need to do is set up MQTT in Frigate, and the blueprint will do the rest.

Creating a Frigate actionable notification with Home Assistant

There’s a fantastic blueprint

Using this Frigate blueprint, you can easily create actionable notifications for both Android and iOS. You can also configure it to get a snapshot of what your camera sees, making it perfect for home security or being able to see what’s outside at any given time. The action items include:

• View clip
• View GIF
• View snapshot
• View stream
• Open Home Assistant
• Open Frigate
• Notification history

You can also create a custom action. For example, if you want to use Frigate to identify when a delivery van is outside, you could create a custom action that would open your front gate so that they can drive in. It’s all about creativity, and blueprints like these hand you complete control to build what you want. Combining Frigate with Home Assistant gives you all the benefits of a self-hosted NVR and all the flexibility of Home Assistant and everything that it has access to.

Building an actionable notification from scratch

There’s a great pre-made option you can try out

If you want to make your own actionable notification, it doesn’t have to be difficult. Home Assistant has a sample script that you can modify to create a notification with an action to run when the confirm button is pressed. All you need to do is go to Automations & Scenes in Home Assistant, then click Scripts, then click Create Script in the bottom right. It will offer you to create a new script or to create a Confirmable Notification. Select that one, and you can modify it to your own liking and needs.

Once you’ve saved it and given it a name, you can then create an automation that will execute the script based on a specific trigger. In the above example, I created a trigger that would activate when it passes sunset according to AccuWeather, but you can make it do anything. Any device that has an action can be automated in this way, triggered entirely based on a notification that you confirm from your phone.

If you want more control over your notifications, you can use the YAML editor to create them and specify exactly what happens based on the buttons that you press. The Home Assistant documentation has some great examples of what you can do with these, including making a phone call, opening your browser, or even launching an app on your phone.

If you’re not using actionable notifications, you absolutely need to. Since I’ve started using them, they’ve made things significantly easier in managing my smart home, and with how easy they are to use, there’s no reason not to.