Home Assistant Cloud speech-to-text sometimes breaks cardinal directions

[pilot51]

The problem

I have a number of lights that have a name with a cardinal direction because sometimes that makes the most sense for the position of a light in an area.

I've found that HA Cloud's speech-to-text engine sometimes converts north/south/east/west to N/S/E/W, which causes Assist to not recognize the device I'm talking about. It's annoying and I usually end up asking Google Assistant to do it.

For example, when I tell Assist to "Set kitchen west to 50%", it's recognized as "set kitchen W to 50%" and responds "Sorry, I couldn't understand that".

However, if I say "Turn off kitchen west", it's recognized correctly and turns off the light.

What version of Home Assistant Core has the issue?

core-2024.9.1

What was the last working version of Home Assistant Core?

No response

What type of installation are you running?

Home Assistant Container

Integration causing the issue

Home Assistant Cloud

Link to integration documentation on our website

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/cloud/

Diagnostics information

No response

Example YAML snippet

No response

Anything in the logs that might be useful for us?

No response

Additional information

Sorry if this isn't the right place. I couldn't find a better place to report bugs that are on the cloud side of HA Cloud rather than Core or an integration.

[home-assistant[bot]]

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[issue-triage-workflows[bot]]

There hasn't been any activity on this issue recently. Due to the high number of incoming GitHub notifications, we have to clean some of the old issues, as many of them have already been resolved with the latest updates. Please make sure to update to the latest Home Assistant version and check if that solves the issue. Let us know if that works for you by adding a comment 👍 This issue has now been marked as stale and will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[pilot51]

This issue still exists in 2024.12.4.

[issue-triage-workflows[bot]]

There hasn't been any activity on this issue recently. Due to the high number of incoming GitHub notifications, we have to clean some of the old issues, as many of them have already been resolved with the latest updates. Please make sure to update to the latest Home Assistant version and check if that solves the issue. Let us know if that works for you by adding a comment 👍 This issue has now been marked as stale and will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[pilot51]

This issue still exists in 2025.3.3.

[issue-triage-workflows[bot]]

There hasn't been any activity on this issue recently. Due to the high number of incoming GitHub notifications, we have to clean some of the old issues, as many of them have already been resolved with the latest updates. Please make sure to update to the latest Home Assistant version and check if that solves the issue. Let us know if that works for you by adding a comment 👍 This issue has now been marked as stale and will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[pilot51]

This issue still exists in 2025.6.1.

[balloob]

Yeah, this is something in the Speech-to-Text engine and not something that we can directly control. The easiest will be to add an alias to each entity with the output of the STT engine.

[pilot51]

Who does control the engine?

I'm using aliases and it mostly works, but it's a workaround nobody would want to have to do, let alone find out the hard way that they need to do it.

When Assist reads back the device name it heard, such as when I tried telling it to set the light to "warm white" (which I use all the time through Google) and it doesn't understand and says it's unaware of the device, it reads the abbreviated name and sounds unnatural. If it heard me right and reads back what I said, it should say the same words I said.

[issue-triage-workflows[bot]]

There hasn't been any activity on this issue recently. Due to the high number of incoming GitHub notifications, we have to clean some of the old issues, as many of them have already been resolved with the latest updates. Please make sure to update to the latest Home Assistant version and check if that solves the issue. Let us know if that works for you by adding a comment 👍 This issue has now been marked as stale and will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[pilot51]

This issue still exists in 2025.9.3.

My question about who controls the STT engine was not answered, so I don't know where else to go to report the issue.

As I previously mentioned, aliases are a workaround and this is still a bug that I think should be fixed. I am using them to alleviate the issue.

I've also started using faster-whisper for local STT which does not have this issue. However, it is slower than HA Cloud on my 10 year old Intel NUC 5, so I don't use it all the time.