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Home Assistant Templating and integrations to have some fun with your briefing

I wanted to add some fun things to the Announcement, So I went in search of different ways to do that. I landed on adding:

A random quote
a random fact
and
a random Dad Joke

The first hurdle is getting the data into Home Assistant to then be able to use it in the templates.

Thankfully, I found a good source of all 3 available via REST API's, all from API Ninjas The API documentations are:

There's plenty more API's that might be useful so I recommend checking out API Ninjas. You'll need to sign up for an API Key, but it's free.

Restful Sensor integration

So to get the data into Home Assistant, we're going to use the RESTful Sensor integration, this involves modifying your configuration.yaml file.

I also make use of the secrets.yaml file to store the APINinjas API key.

your secrets.yaml file entry should look like this:

ninjas_api: <YOUR_API_KEY>

obviously substituting <YOUR_API_KEY> for the API Key you were issued by API Ninjas.

Pro-Tip

After Logging into API Ninjas website, you'll find your API Key at:

My Account,

API Statistics

and

Show API Key

The Home Assistant RestFul API Setups

Quote "sensor"

The configuration.yaml entry I came up with for the Quote Sensor looks like this

sensor:
  - platform: rest
    name: Quote Sensor
    unique_id: quote_sensor
    resource: https://api.api-ninjas.com/v1/quotes?
    method: GET
    scan_interval: 7200
    headers:
      X-Api-Key: !secret ninjas_api
    value_template: "{{ value_json[0].quote }}"
    json_attributes_path: "$.[0]"
    json_attributes:
      - "author"
      - "category"

This creates a Sensor entity in Home Assistant with the "State" being the Quote, and attributes with the Author and the category.

This becomes important when we get to the Announcement

Dad Joke

For the Dad Joke, we don't really need any other attributes, so the code is a bit simpler

sensor:
  - platform: rest
    name: Dad Joke Of the Hour
    unique_id: dad_joke
    resource: https://api.api-ninjas.com/v1/dadjokes?limit=1
    method: GET
    scan_interval: 7200
    headers:
      X-Api-Key: !secret ninjas_api
    value_template: "{{ value_json[0].joke }}"

Which creates a Sensor entity with the Dad Joke as it's State

Random Fact

And again, very simple for the Random Fact

sensor:
  - platform: rest
    name: Random Fact
    unique_id: random_fact
    resource: https://api.api-ninjas.com/v1/facts?limit=1
    method: GET
    scan_interval: 7200
    headers:
      X-Api-Key: !secret ninjas_api
    value_template: "{{ value_json.articles[0].title }}"

Announcing Jokes, facts, and quotes

Starting with the Quote

So for the quote, I want to know the "Category" of quote.
There's a list of categories in the API Documentation.
Expect results like:

marriage
government
age
movies

so that line of code looks like this:

The {{ state_attr( 'sensor.quote_sensor', 'category' ) }} Quote of the day is

I also want to know who said it:

by {{ state_attr( 'sensor.quote_sensor', 'author' ) }}.

And lastly, obviously, the quote:

They said. {{ states('sensor.quote_sensor') }}

Put altogether, it looks like this.

The {{ state_attr( 'sensor.quote_sensor', 'category' ) }} Quote of the day is by {{ state_attr( 'sensor.quote_sensor', 'author' ) }}. 
They said. {{ states('sensor.quote_sensor') }}

Now for a Dad Joke

This one is easy. We only need the state of the sensor entity we created:

Here is a Dad Joke.. {{ states('sensor.dad_joke_of_the_hour') }}

The double stop in the template here adds an additional slight pause to the end of "Here is a Dad Joke". It just seemed to flow better out of the Text To Speech that way

Lastly, our Random Fact

Again, very simple, only needing to read the State of our Random Fact Entity.

And a random fact.. {{ states('sensor.random_fact') }}

Again, the double stop seemed to make the timeing better.

Put All Together

The {{ state_attr( 'sensor.quote_sensor', 'category' ) }} Quote of the day is by {{ state_attr( 'sensor.quote_sensor', 'author' ) }}. 
They said. {{ states('sensor.quote_sensor') }}

Here is a Dad Joke.. {{ states('sensor.dad_joke_of_the_hour') }}

And a random fact.. {{ states('sensor.random_fact') }}

Into a Script

alias: Announce Wind Details
  sequence:
  - service: notify.alexa_media
    data:
      message: >_
      The {{ state_attr( 'sensor.quote_sensor', 'category' ) }} Quote of the day is by {{ state_attr( 'sensor.quote_sensor', 'author' ) }}. 
      They said. {{ states('sensor.quote_sensor') }}

      Here is a Dad Joke.. {{ states('sensor.dad_joke_of_the_hour') }}

      And a random fact.. {{ states('sensor.random_fact') }}
    - media_player.dining_room_echo_plus
  mode: single

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