This guide gathers the most-used Xiaozhi AI voice commands into a scenario-by-scenario list you can simply read out, and explains the capability behind each one. There are no fixed phrases to memorise — say it your way, and it does it.
CONTENTS
- How to talk to it
- Controlling devices
- Checking on your home
- Running a whole routine in one sentence
- Creating by voice
- Editing, deleting and organising
- Calendar, announcements and reminders
- System updates and troubleshooting
- What is behind these commands
- Habits that make commands land better
01
How to talk to it
- Wake word: just say “Xiaozhi” to start a conversation. The portable handheld Xiaozhi and handheld terminals support a quick press-to-wake instead.
- No phrases to memorise: spoken language is matched to capabilities on the fly. Say “leaving home” and the Leaving-Home Check routine is picked up automatically; say “automation diagnosis” and the troubleshooting agent is found — instead of a flat “not supported”.
- Several things in one breath: a single sentence can hold several devices and several actions; they run in order and the outcome is announced by voice.
- Complex conditions are understood: with a large model connected, requests with exclusions such as “turn off every light in the living room except the light strip, keep the bedside lamp” are executed correctly.
- Just say it again to change it: say “change X to Y” and it looks up the existing object before editing — it will not quietly create a duplicate.
iWaking differs slightly by device: AI speakers and the host wake on voice; the robot dog Xiaozhi and the handheld Xiaozhi support spoken dialogue; a handheld terminal can also send announcements to a speaker in another room.
02
Controlling devices
Turn on the living room lights
Lights in that area come on immediately — speak and it is done
Turn off the living room lights
The named lights turn off, and every action is logged so you can look it up later
Turn on all the lights
With no room given it defaults to the current area and suggests “turn on all lights in the house”
Turn on all lights in the house
Every light in the house turns on, including switches whose name contains “light”
Turn on the master bedroom lights
Only the master bedroom lights turn on — no other room is touched
Set the ambience light to red
The ambience light or light strip switches to the colour you name
Turn on the underfloor heating
It picks a mode the device actually supports (heating) so it succeeds the first time
Set the air conditioner to 26 degrees
The temperature is applied — no more false “already on” replies
Open the curtains / Close the curtains
Curtains open or close as instructed
Turn on the ceiling light, the porch light, the downlights and the light strip, set the ambience light to red, close the curtains, and tell me by voice when done
Many devices and actions run from one sentence, with the result announced by voice
Turn off every light in the living room except the light strip, keep the bedside lamp
The large model understands the exclusion: it turns off the ceiling light, downlights and spotlights in the living room, keeps the light strip and the bedside lamp, and reports “turned off 3 lights in the living room”
03
Checking on your home
Which lights are in the tea room?
Lists the lights in that room — no more false “there are no lights in this room”
Which presence sensors are in the master bedroom?
Queries sensors by room: entity first, device as fallback, all in one go
Is anyone in the room?
Presence is judged from the sensors and answered with “someone is in the room” or “nobody”
How is the system health?
Reports CPU usage, memory, disk usage and temperature, with a verdict
What is on my calendar today?
Summarises today’s calendar events and reads them out one by one
What scripts are there?
Lists the scripts — no need to dig through the backend
Show me the log
Queries the system log; a time range can be given too
When did the ceiling light turn on today?
Looks up device history, with times shown in your own time zone
When did the living room light turn off last night?
Cross-day queries return the right result as well
How long has this device been on?
Returns each state segment’s duration, cumulative on/off totals and how long the current state has lasted
What is today’s high temperature?
Returns the weather value recorded for today — no need to check a forecast
iAll queries go through a single entry point, so one sentence gets the answer. Deletion likewise has one entry point — see section 06.
04
Running a whole routine in one sentence
These five routines cover an entire check-and-act sequence from one sentence, instead of spelling it out step by step.
Leaving-home check
Looks at which lights are still on and whether anyone is home, turns the lights off, and finally announces “leaving-home check done: turned off 3 lights, nobody is home”
Bedtime check
Checks lights, curtains and door lock in one pass, turns lights off when needed and says good night
Morning briefing
Bundles today’s weather, calendar and to-dos into one spoken summary
I’m home
Turns on the living room lights and the air conditioner and plays a welcome message
System health check
Checks host CPU / memory / disk / temperature, HA health and available updates, then announces the verdict
iRoutines act on the situation: if every light is already off, the leaving-home check will not fiddle with the lights — it only reports. Results are concrete too, such as “3 lights are still on” rather than a vague “check complete”. Each routine runs with a 45–60 second timeout, so if one device responds slowly it will tell you honestly which steps did complete.
05
Creating by voice
Scenes, scripts, automations (blueprints) and helper elements can all be described in one natural-language sentence. It picks a usable mode, fills in details such as offsets, and gets on with it.
Create a party scene in the living room and bring in the relevant devices
It finds the living room ceiling light, ambience light and curtains, assembles the scene, and announces that it is done
Make me a script that simulates me being at home, running every day at 8pm
The script is generated and scheduled, with a clean and editable structure
Make me a script that repeats 5 times, turning on the ceiling light each time, one second apart
It uses a real loop instead of copying the action five times
Create an automation that opens the curtains at sunrise and closes them at sunset
A reusable blueprint is produced with sunrise and sunset offsets already considered — you just pick a curtain entity and save
Create an automation: when the outdoor temperature is above 40 degrees and the humidity is above 60%, and the sun is up, turn on the air conditioner and announce “it is too hot and humid now, take care against heatstroke”
The sentence is split into triggers and actions and written into the automation manager
Create a home-mode script that runs the home routine while the ceiling light is on, pauses when the light goes off, resumes when it comes back on, and ends after 2 minutes without the light
One gated script covers “device on → run, off → pause, on again → resume, timeout → exit”
Create a guest button helper element, then create an automation that uses it to trigger guest mode
The helper element is created first and the linking automation second — both from one sentence
Create a helper element that counts how many air conditioners are currently on
A statistics helper is generated and can be shown straight on a dashboard
Create a two-way blueprint / Bind the porch light and the ceiling light to this blueprint
A bidirectional blueprint is generated first, then the actual lights are bound to it for two-way or multi-way control
Bind home mode to the home button and away mode to the away button
Wall switches trigger scenes directly, in under ten seconds
Create a good-night scene
A moon icon is assigned automatically; “create home mode” gets a house icon, “record the daily wind speed” gets a wind icon
iFor weather records (today’s high or low temperature, UV, wind speed, humidity, rainfall and so on) the system fills in the day’s value automatically at 00:05 every night — and the record is queryable the same day it is created, with no overnight wait.
06
Editing, deleting and organising
Also turn on the light strip in the guest scene
It finds the existing scene first and edits it — no duplicate scene with the same name
Delete the weather update automation / Delete the guest scene / Delete the air-conditioner-count helper
A single “delete X” entry point recognises the type automatically and finishes in one go — no more deleting the wrong object
Rename the porch switch to entrance switch / Rename the big light to ceiling light
Device and individual entity renames both take effect immediately
Move the weather update automation into the “weather” category
The category is created or reused and the automation filed under it; say “move it out of the category” to undo
Change the bedtime reminder and the lighting link to queue mode
“Run at the same time” and “only one at a time” also work, so actions stop competing
Give all my automations a suitable icon
Icons are matched in bulk from the names and updated in one pass
i“Delete X” covers: helper elements (buttons, switches, numbers and so on), automations, scenes, scripts, to-dos, calendar events, categories, tags, groups, geofences, areas, floors, entities, devices, dashboards and blueprints.
07
Calendar, announcements and reminders
Add an event to my calendar: buy a car on 9 July, 11am
The date, time and content are extracted and synced to the digital calendar
Play on the living room speaker: dinner is ready, please come to the dining room
The announcement goes to the speaker in the room you name, and the handheld shows “announcement complete”
It is too hot and humid now, take care against heatstroke
Usable as the spoken message inside an automation, announced once the condition is met
08
System updates and troubleshooting
Is there a new version? / Check for updates
Announces the current and the latest version — no need to click through the integration page
What changed in the new version?
Summarises the release; say “tell me more” for the details
Upgrade the system
It first warns that “the upgrade reboots the host and the voice assistant goes offline for 1–2 minutes”, and only starts after you say “confirm upgrade”
Why does the living room ceiling light show as unavailable? / Device X is not responding / is offline
Device troubleshooting: checks the entity state, its integration, history and logs, then gives a cause and a fix
Why did my rain reminder automation stop working?
Automation diagnosis: checks whether it was disabled, whether it ever triggered, whether the actions succeeded and whether the referenced entities still exist, then pinpoints the failing step
The range hood could not be controlled
The device collects your report and creates a backend bug record with the error, the timestamp and the operation log
iBoth troubleshooting agents report progress while they work (“first the configuration… now the trigger history…”) and summarise at the end. They are also read-only: nothing in your setup is changed.
10
Habits that make commands land better
- Give the room before the device: “the master bedroom light” lands far better than “that light”.
- Say “whole house” for the whole house: “turn on all the lights” opens the current area by default; “turn on all lights in the house” covers everything.
- Put complex requests in one sentence: conditions, actions and the spoken message together — it splits them up itself.
- Ask it first when something breaks: “why is X not working” triggers troubleshooting, and troubleshooting is read-only, so your setup is untouched.
- Rename by voice too: device and entity renames take effect immediately; after renaming, remember to let any automation that references it update as well.
09
What is behind these commands
1
Voice assistant with a large model (LTCN AI Conversation)
The voice assistant built into HA used to understand you only through fixed rules, and anything more complex was lost on it. It can now be connected to a large model for a big jump in comprehension.
Supported models
DeepSeek, OpenAI, Kimi, Zhipu, Tongyi Qianwen, SiliconFlow and local Ollama models — 8 providers
Setup
Pick a provider and paste the API key; the model name and the endpoint are configured for you
Switching
Open Manage and set the assistant’s conversation agent to LTCN AI; enabling “prefer local processing” is recommended to save tokens
2
Memory and habits agent
The system works out which devices you control most and at what times you usually do things, then takes those habits into account in later conversations. If you normally turn the living room light off at 10pm, saying just “turn off the light” will still find the right one.
All memory is stored in a local database — nothing leaves the device.
3
The “routines” and “agents” framework
- Routines bundle multi-step tasks into one sentence: “leaving-home check” looks at the lights, then at who is home, and gives you a verdict in one go.
- Acts on the situation: when the condition does not hold it will not go through the motions.
- Concrete results: announcements carry the actual numbers rather than a vague conclusion.
- Timeout protection: 45–60 seconds, so one slow device cannot stall a whole routine.
- Agents: the framework for multi-step reasoning and self-diagnosis is in place; device troubleshooting and automation diagnosis are its first releases.
4
Local high-frequency control acceleration
Lights, curtains and air conditioners use a local high-frequency control path: from a parsed command to execution takes only 0.006–0.009 ms, well under the 1 ms target. That is why everyday actions such as “turn on the living room lights” happen the moment you finish speaking.
5
Single entry points, faster responses
Deletion is unified into “delete X” and queries go through a single entry point. At the same time, many rarely used features moved from an always-on menu to lookup-on-demand, so first-pass recognition is more accurate and responses are faster and lighter on resources.
6
Connecting external AI tools (MCP)
Any MCP-capable AI client — Cursor, Claude, Codex, Workbuddy and others — can connect and control your smart home, sending instructions in plain language.
- In the HA integration page click “View API key”; the key appears in a notification and can be copied straight away
- Configure the MCP connection in your AI tool and paste the key
- Then simply say “turn on the living room lights and set the air conditioner to 26 degrees”
If you are worried about the key leaking, click “Regenerate API key” and the old one stops working immediately. External access reuses the existing HA address and sign-in token, with the endpoint path /api/ltcn_mcp/mcp — no extra port needs to be opened on your router.
7
Automation without the learning curve
- Blueprints: automation templates where you pick a few parameters — no YAML written by hand.
- Helper elements: buttons, switches, number tables and so on; good for statistics (how many air conditioners are on) and equally able to trigger scenes.
- Execution modes: simultaneous, queued, or only one at a time, so actions stop interfering with each other.
- Categories: file automations, scenes and scripts under a category so the manager stays readable.
