The commentary around the word “stop” actually reminds me of a surprising interaction I had with a proprietary home-assistant device I had while at a friend’s place.
My friend has much of his A/V gear hooked up to his HA device, so we were able to tell it to turn on the projector and start streaming a movie to it. At some point, we put some pizzas in the oven and asked the HA device to set a timer to tell us when they were cooked, and resumed watching the movie.
At some point during the movie something interesting happened, so we wanted to pause the movie to discuss the interesting thing that happened in the movie, but our attempt to pause the movie didn’t work. Puzzled, we tried again; it worked the second time.
After several minutes discussing whatever plot point had taken our interest, we resumed the movie. Some time later, we noticed a burning smell; we jumped up and pulled the pizzas out just in time! They were extra toasted around the edge, but still edible.
I’m sure you can tell what happened: our first attempt to pause the movie actually paused our cooking timer!
In this case, I don’t think his HA device didn’t have a screen, so it could be difficult for the device to choose what we wanted to pause. But even a display might not help; the HA device may not be able to determine what it is we are focused on and therefore what should be paused.
Perhaps an interaction like this would have helped:
- Me: “pause”
- HA: “the movie, or the timer?”
I have no idea what you would do if there were multiple times, either with or without a movie or background music… A conundrum to be sure!
PS: if the HA device did choose one thing when there were multiple candidates, perhaps some unambiguous feedback would help; for example, the situation above would have been easy for us to resolve if my friend’s HA device told us “I’ve paused your timer”. I don’t recall there being any feedback at all, or if there was it was drowned out by the movie…