Your smart home, by conversation

Talking to Charyl about your smart home works the same everywhere she’s available — the web dock, the full-page chat, or the mobile app. Ask her about a device, a sensor, or a camera in plain language, and she resolves it against your actual home rather than a generic list of possibilities.

What she can act on

Charyl can switch, dim, recolor, and set the color temperature or a preset on lights, switches, and fans — comfort and convenience, not the systems that secure the house. A few examples of what that looks like in practice:

• “Turn off the living room lights.”
• “Dim the bedroom lights to 30 percent.”
• “Set the porch light to warm white.”
• “Turn the bedroom fan to medium.”

Each of these resolves to a specific device, and each one waits for your confirmation before anything actually changes.

1. Ask

   Describe what you want in plain language — by room, by name, or by what it does. She figures out which device you mean.

2. Confirm

   She shows you exactly what she’s about to do and waits for a tap. Nothing changes on the strength of your message alone.

3. Done — and briefly trusted

   Once you’ve confirmed, similar commands for the same family of device go through without asking again for about 90 seconds, so a run of related requests doesn’t mean a run of taps.

Reading state is always fair game

Asking about a device is never restricted, no matter what kind of device it is. “Is the back door locked” and “is the garage open” are always answerable, straight from the device’s own reported state. If a reading is missing or stale, she says so rather than guessing — the boundary below is only about acting, never about asking.

What she won’t do, and why

Charyl will not lock or unlock a door, open or close a garage door, or move a cover or blind, in any conversation. These actions are excluded outright, not merely gated behind an extra confirmation. For them, the web app and the mobile app both have their own device controls, with their own confirm step.

Thermostat and HVAC control isn’t available at all yet, through Charyl or through the app directly. It isn’t a Charyl-specific gap — nobody can do it through the product today.

Sensors, in summary

Temperature, humidity, pressure, light, and presence all answer in conversation as summaries — an average, a range, whether a space is occupied — rather than a raw feed:

• “What was the average kitchen temperature today?”
• “Has anyone been in the garage in the last hour?”

Both come back as an answer in the reply itself, not a chart. If you want to watch a trend over time instead of asking for a point-in-time summary, that’s what the sensor cards on your dashboard are built for; see dashboards by conversation for how those get built.

Alongside Home Assistant, not instead of it

If you already run Home Assistant, connecting it brings its devices into everything above — Charyl reads and, for lights, switches, and fans, acts on them the same way as anything else in your home. Home Assistant keeps doing what it already does; Charyl is a way of talking to it.

Where to go next

For the full picture of what’s controllable today, see what Charyl can control; for how confirmation and the trust window work in more depth, see why she asks you to confirm. For cameras, which follow their own rules, see the cameras guide.