Herald is a production-ready Home Assistant notification control plane for HACS. It sits between automations and users and decides how notifications should be enriched, routed, aggregated, spoken, and delivered.

Automation / Script -> Herald -> User / Device / Voice

• accepts semantic events through herald.notify
• resolves presence, room, recipients, language, and character from Home Assistant
• routes through push, voice, Telegram, dashboard, persistent, TV, and system channels
• supports queueing, deduplication, delay, summaries, and runtime diagnostics
• exposes Herald-owned runtime controls directly on the integration page
• speaks its own control-plane actions when someone is home
• selects the best room output device with fallback Alice -> HomePod -> TV

service: herald.notify
data:
  event: washing_cycle_finished
  message: Washer cycle completed
  level: info
  ai:
    character: domovoy
    context:
      mode: brief
  context:
    appliance: washer
  entities:
    - sensor.washer_state
  suppress: 120
  group: laundry
  immediately: false

1. Add https://github.com/Mesteriis/ha-herald as a custom repository of type Integration.
2. Install Herald AI Notification Center.
3. Restart Home Assistant.
4. Add the integration in Settings -> Devices & Services.

Copy this repository into config/custom_components/herald/ and restart Home Assistant.

Herald creates runtime entities for:

• AI enablement and AI per severity
• severity enablement
• maintenance mode and maintenance minimum level
• mute all
• dashboard sidebar visibility
• channel family toggles
• per-user language, character, and silent mode
• per-room fallback presence and room notification output device
• per-channel enablement, minimum level, and test buttons
• per-flow enablement, summary window, dedup window, cooldown, and test buttons

• Architecture
• System
• Controls
• API
• Dashboard
• Release
• HACS migration
• Changelog

Aleksandr Meshchryakov avm@sh-inc.ru