Integrate Ollama with Home Assistant: A Complete Guide
Z
Zack Saadioui
8/12/2025
So, You Wanna Chat With Your House? Integrating Ollama with Home Assistant
Hey everyone, hope you're doing well. I’ve been messing around with my smart home setup again & I stumbled onto something that’s, honestly, a game-changer. If you're into Home Assistant & you've been hearing the buzz about local AI & large language models (LLMs), then you’ve probably heard of Ollama. The big question I had was, "Can I actually get this thing to work with my Home Assistant?"
Turns out, the answer is a big, resounding YES. And it’s pretty awesome.
I went down the rabbit hole on this one, & I'm here to share what I found. This isn't just about sticking two pieces of tech together; it's about fundamentally changing how you interact with your smart home. We're talking about moving beyond rigid commands & into natural, fluid conversations.
What’s the Big Deal, Anyway?
First off, let's break down why this is so cool. For years, voice assistants have been dominated by the big players: Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, & Apple's Siri. They're powerful, for sure, but they all have one thing in common: the cloud. Your commands, your data, it all gets sent off to a server somewhere.
Ollama flips the script. It lets you run powerful open-source large language models, like Llama 3, Mistral, & others, right on your own hardware in your own home. When you pair that with Home Assistant, the brain of your smart home, you get some serious benefits:
Privacy: This is the big one for a lot of people. Your conversations with your home stay in your home. No data is sent to a third-party server for processing. That’s a huge win for privacy-conscious users.
Speed: Because everything is happening on your local network, the response times can be incredibly fast. There's no round trip to a cloud server & back.
Customization: This is where it gets REALLY fun. You're not stuck with a pre-programmed personality. You can tailor the AI's responses, give it a unique character, & even tell it how it should interact with your home's devices. Want a sarcastic assistant? You can do that. Want one that talks like a pirate? Go for it.
Offline Functionality: If your internet goes down, your cloud-based assistant becomes a paperweight. A local assistant powered by Ollama? It'll keep on working, as long as your local network is up.
This integration basically gives your Home Assistant a powerful, private, & customizable brain that you have complete control over. It's the ultimate step in self-hosted smart home control.
How to Get It All Set Up: The User's Guide
Alright, let's get to the nuts & bolts. Honestly, I was expecting this to be a nightmare of command lines & YAML files, but the Home Assistant community has made it surprisingly straightforward. There's now an official Ollama integration, which makes things a whole lot easier.
Here’s the general game plan:
Step 1: Get Ollama Running
Before you can integrate anything, you need to have an Ollama server running somewhere on your network.
Installation: Head over to the Ollama website & download the application for your operating system. They have versions for Windows, macOS, & Linux. The installation is pretty simple.
Network Access: Here’s a key part. By default, Ollama only listens for requests from the computer it's installed on (localhost). You need to configure it to be accessible from other devices on your network, specifically your Home Assistant instance. This usually involves setting an environment variable or modifying a systemd service file on Linux to make it listen on
1
0.0.0.0
instead of
1
127.0.0.1
. The Ollama docs have clear instructions on this.
Pull a Model: Once Ollama is running, you need to give it a brain. You do this by "pulling" a model. Open your terminal or command prompt & run a command like
1
ollama pull mistral
or
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ollama pull llama3
. This will download the model & make it available for use.
Step 2: The Home Assistant Integration
Now for the magic. Once your Ollama server is up & humming on your network, it's time to introduce it to Home Assistant.
In your Home Assistant dashboard, go to Settings > Devices & Services.
Click the
Add Integration
button in the bottom right corner.
Search for "Ollama" & select it from the list.
A configuration window will pop up. This is where you tell Home Assistant how to find your Ollama server.
URL: Enter the URL of your Ollama server. It'll be something like
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http://[YOUR_OLLAMA_IP_ADDRESS]:11434
.
Model: Type in the name of the model you downloaded, like
1
mistral
or
1
llama3:8b
.
Follow the on-screen prompts, & that's pretty much it. The integration will be set up.
Step 3: Configure Assist to Use Ollama
The final piece of the puzzle is telling Home Assistant's voice assistant, Assist, to use your new Ollama-powered brain.
Go to Settings > Voice assistants.
You can either modify the default "My Home Assistant" pipeline or create a new one.
In the pipeline settings, under Conversation agent, select your new Ollama agent.
And you're done! You can now open the Assist chat (either by clicking the chat icon in the top bar or using a voice assistant device) & start talking to your house through your own private AI.
Going Deeper: Customization & Advanced Setups
The basic setup is awesome, but the real power is in the customization. In the Ollama integration's options, you'll find a field for "Instructions" (sometimes called a prompt or system prompt). This is where you define the AI's personality & purpose.
You can write instructions like:
"You are a helpful smart home assistant named Jarvis. You respond concisely and accurately. You are controlling a smart home powered by Home Assistant."
"You are a sarcastic and slightly annoyed AI that begrudgingly controls the lights and tells me the temperature. Be funny but still helpful."
This is also where you can enable the experimental feature to Control Home Assistant. This gives the model the ability to actually do things—turn on lights, change the thermostat, etc.—not just report on their status. This is a HUGE step forward, moving Ollama from just a query engine to an active participant in your smart home automation.
For the real power users out there, you'll find people running Ollama in a Docker container, often using a
1
docker-compose.yml
file to manage it alongside other services. Some are even passing through a GPU (like an NVIDIA card) to their Docker or Proxmox VM to get a serious performance boost for the AI models. This is pretty advanced stuff, but it shows just how high the ceiling is for this kind of setup.
A Quick Word on Business & Customer Interaction
As I was diving into this, it got me thinking about how this same technology applies beyond just a smart home. The ability to create a highly customized, data-private AI chatbot is incredibly powerful.
It’s exactly what companies like Arsturn are helping businesses do. Imagine a business wanting to provide instant, 24/7 customer support on their website. They could use Arsturn to build a no-code AI chatbot trained specifically on their own business data—their product manuals, their FAQs, their policies. This chatbot can then answer customer questions, generate leads, & engage with visitors in a personalized way. It’s the same core concept: a specialized AI assistant, but instead of controlling lights, it’s driving business goals. The chatbot becomes an expert on your business, just like our Ollama integration becomes an expert on our house. Pretty cool to see the parallels.
Limitations & The Road Ahead
Now, let's be real. Is it perfect? Not quite. The technology is still evolving.
Some older discussions & tutorials might mention that the integration can only query information & can't control devices. While this was a limitation, the official integration now has experimental control features, so things are moving fast. The quality of the responses & the model's ability to understand your specific requests will also depend heavily on the model you choose & the quality of your prompt engineering.
You might have to experiment with a few different models to find one that's the right balance of speed & smarts for your hardware. Smaller models will be faster but might not be as capable, while larger models are smarter but require more processing power.
My Final Thoughts
Honestly, setting up Ollama with Home Assistant has been one of the most rewarding smart home projects I've tackled in a while. It feels like you're truly on the cutting edge, building a next-generation smart home experience that is entirely your own.
The ability to have a private, fast, & endlessly customizable AI at the heart of your home is something I thought was years away, but it's here now. It takes a bit of tinkering, sure, but the payoff is immense. You're not just a user of your smart home anymore; you're its architect, its programmer, & its conversational partner.
If you’ve got a Home Assistant setup & you're not afraid to get your hands a little dirty, I can't recommend this enough. Give it a shot.
Hope this was helpful! Let me know what you think or if you've tried it yourself.