this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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Whisper turning a number into a word fucked my next water bill (blimps.xyz)
submitted 1 week ago by kayohtie@pawb.social to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world
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Basically, I was super tired getting home from an event last night and didn't even notice the water hadn't stopped flowing normally. It's quiet so I don't normally hear it.

Apparently at some point a couple hours in a fitting in my drip setup blew, flooding my peppers planter entirely and in the process burning through nearly 4000 liters of water before I caught it on my way out the door to work this morning.

I've since learned there's a Z2M command to start watering on a timer, but I didn't know that before and trusted Whisper to not fuck this up. My fault.

Don't think my water bill company will be amenable to it. I'll call and ask but, fuck.

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[–] kayohtie@pawb.social 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I set it up as just a sentence automation, not as a separate script being fired where that'd have caused an error. I've not found a means of forcing validation like that in sentence automations, only in custom sentences/intents (never quite gotten a handle on those)

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Template Conditions in that case. Ensure it falls between a specific range when ingested as an intent, and reject if not within that range. Should help you avoid future issues like this.

[–] kayohtie@pawb.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yep. In the fix I linked I set it up to default to a word if it fails the template instead, so it'll then check for a match to that word ("fail") and if so it just falls back to 5 minutes and will tell me as much.

Going to be a hell of a lot better about that in the future though. Was definitely a rookie mistake on my part to assume that just because it'd worked every time I'd tested it, used it, and with timers and all thus far that it would always work 100% of the time. Why assume when you can validate? I do in code I write... Guess I don't think about it in the same way with HA as much, oops.