In Home Assistant 2023.7 a feature was added to allow services to provide a response.
This release brings in a change to Home Assistant, which we consider to be one of the biggest game changers of the past years: Services can now respond with data! 🤯
It is such a fundamental change, which will allow for many new use cases and opens the gates for endless possibilities.
In this release the functionality has only been enabled for a couple of services, but I’m having trouble picturing what we can use this for now and in the future.
What are some use cases you can think of on how to use this new feature?
I’m struggling with this too, but I think the idea is that it allows for fully synchronous requests. You can wait for something long running to finish or for response data to be returned (this could be a generated AI response) and still close out the initial request. The old way to do it was to issue the service call and then monitor the state of the entity to confirm it changed.
I also think it can help with multiple service calls tied into the same verbal request (e.g. “Turn on the light and open the shades”).