Intercom

LAN intercom for OVOS - "send a message to the bedroom" delivers a spoken message to a named peer OVOS device on the same local network, with an optional spoken reply sent back. Fully offline, available in English, Danish, German, French, and Spanish.

• The one non-negotiable boundary
• Setup
• Usage
• How discovery and delivery work
• Known limitations
• Install
• Development

The one non-negotiable boundary

This skill speaks messages. It never executes commands. A received message is only ever passed to self.speak() - it is never routed through the intent pipeline. "Set an alarm in the bedroom from the living room" is explicitly out of scope; that would be remote command execution, a categorically different (and far more dangerous) capability than delivering a spoken message. See DEVELOPMENT.md for why relaying to the target's own OVOS messagebus was investigated and rejected, and why this isn't "a smaller HiveMind."

Setup

Each device needs a name and a shared household code, set by voice on that specific device:

"set intercom name to living room"
"set intercom code to four seven two nine"

Every device that should participate says the same code - not a separate secret per pair of devices. Say it once per device; any two devices with matching codes can message each other.

The name and code can also be set in the skill's settings (intercom_name, intercom_code in its settings.json, or a settings UI). A new name is advertised as soon as the settings are saved - no restart needed.

Usage

"send a message to the bedroom"
  -> "what should I say?"
  -> [you speak the message]
  -> "message sent"

[on the bedroom device]
  "message from living room"
  [message is spoken]
  "do you want to reply?"
  -> "yes" -> "go ahead, say your reply" -> [you speak it] -> "reply sent"

Or say the message in the same sentence:

"send a message to the bedroom saying dinner is ready"
  -> "message sent"
"send en besked til soveværelset og sig maden er klar"   (Danish)

"send en besked til soveværelset"                  (Danish)
"sende eine nachricht an schlafzimmer"             (German)
"envoie un message à chambre"                      (French)
"envía un mensaje a dormitorio"                    (Spanish)

How discovery and delivery work

Peer devices are found by name via mDNS - no IP addresses to type or remember. A device advertises itself as soon as it has a name set, even before a code is configured, so a sender gets a specific, useful error ("the bedroom doesn't have an intercom code set") rather than a bare "device not found" when the target exists but isn't fully set up yet.

Delivery is a single HTTP request over the LAN to the discovered peer, carrying the sender's name, the shared code, and the message. The code is never included in the mDNS advertisement itself - it only ever travels inside the actual message request. See DEVELOPMENT.md "Wire protocol" for the exact request/response shape.

Known limitations

• Threat model: a WiFi-password-equivalent, not HiveMind-grade. No encryption on the wire, and the receiver does report back which kind of rejection happened (wrong code vs. no code set at all) rather than staying silent - useful for fixing a real setup problem, at the cost of leaking slightly more than a flat "message not delivered" would. Proportionate to keeping casual LAN presence out, not to defending against a targeted attacker.
• Discovery is a fresh ~3-second scan per send, not a persistent cached browser - simpler, at the cost of a few seconds' latency each time.
• A device that goes offline uncleanly (power loss, not a graceful shutdown) can leave a stale mDNS advertisement lingering in peers' local caches until it naturally expires.

See DEVELOPMENT.md for the full reasoning behind each of these, plus why ovos-skill-network-scanner was deliberately not made a dependency despite similar-looking mDNS code.

Install

pip install ovos-skill-intercom

Development

See DEVELOPMENT.md.

Category

Utility

Tags

#intercom #multi-device #messaging #lan