Over the last few weeks we’ve been discussing the future of smart home interaction internally, and one observation kept coming up.
Even with Home Assistant dashboards, voice assistants, automations, and AI becoming more capable every year, many of us still instinctively reach for a physical button when we want to pause a movie, dim the lights, or turn something off.
It made us wonder:
Has AI actually reduced your reliance on physical controls, or has it made them even more valuable?
We’d love to hear how everyone here uses physical buttons today.
More importantly…
Why?
Is it speed?
Muscle memory?
Reliability?
Or simply because it feels more natural?
We recently wrote a longer article exploring this idea if anyone is interested:
Tracer Link
My three cents:
Our whole home is behind Home Assistant with Lights, heating, temperature and so on and a rather complicated media setup with receiver, Apple TV, Raspi with Kodi, Streaming, multi room capability, infrared receivers/senders etc.
We were using Harmony excessively with Elite Remotes but with the deprecation by Logitech we recently implemented a virtual media framework ourselves in Home Assistant that gives us a central, configurable, activity driven media control center where we use the Harmony only as one control device in parallel to the Astrion and other control interfaces like Lovelace directly, HADashboard etc. on Tablets, Phones etc.
The Astrion is a recent addition that hopefully will replace the Harmony Elites when those break and now allow for a second remote in parallel. Challenge is the lower amount of physical buttons while it’s impossible to define virtual buttons with the current ROScards.
While AI in the form of voice commands is nice it cannot replace physical controls for us. So we also have presence detectors and Zigbee buttons as well as infrared and 433 MHz infrastructure to control things directly instead of only relying on voice.
I’m not sure if is only us but in most cases using voice commands is feeling awkward and unnecessarily complicated vs. simply pressing a button. For media control, a proper remote remains essential anyways. How do you want to efficiently navigate something like Apple TV or Kodi solely with voice?
So, yes, we will be keeping and probably extending physical control device usage. The ideal scenario for us is complete control over everything that can be reasonably controlled from Home Assistant and implement and use all sensible inputs including AI/voice as one part.
I hope that was understandable, feel free to ask if I was unclear somewhere.
Hi Joe, and welcome to the Sanytron community! 
First of all, thank you for taking the time to write such a thoughtful and detailed reply—especially as your very first post here. This is exactly the kind of real-world experience we were hoping to learn from when we started this discussion.
Your setup is fascinating because it reflects something we’ve been seeing more and more often: Home Assistant has become the central control layer, while Harmony, Astrion, dashboards, tablets, Zigbee buttons, and even voice are simply different ways of interacting with the same system.
One sentence in particular really stood out to me:
“…implement and use all sensible inputs including AI/voice as one part.”
I think that captures our own thinking remarkably well. We don’t see AI as replacing physical controls, or dashboards replacing remotes. Each interface has strengths, and the goal is to let people choose the one that feels most natural in the moment.
I was also really interested in your comments about the Harmony Elite and ROScards. It sounds like the biggest limitation isn’t the touchscreen itself, but the number of immediately accessible physical actions and the inability to create additional virtual buttons for your media workflow.
Out of curiosity, which physical buttons or activities do you find yourself missing the most when moving from the Harmony Elite to the Astrion? We’d genuinely love to understand that better, because feedback like yours often shapes the direction of future improvements.
And again, thank you for joining the discussion—we’re really glad to have you here.
Yeah, I’ve been quiet so far since I’m still in the phase of finding out how to optimally include the Astrion in our setup and am really waiting for features that make the touch interface actually usable.
No, the touchscreen itself isn’t a problem, it is in theory much nicer than the one on the Harmony if one could actually make use of it properly.
If I imagine what could be done if we had a Roscard that allowed us to define a array of interface elements like one can do with HADashboard and delivered key presses like the current TV card, that would be perfect and probably be fine from a ressource standpoint on the Astrion.
Right now I’m having to use the TV Roscard so that I can receive button presses in my framework. And that honestly isn’t very helpful beyond the buttons. You’re duplicating physical buttons unnecessarily on the touchscreen (why do I need power and volume controle twice?) and the rest is not configurable and wastes a lot of space. All we are using currently is the media center source picker to select activities.
I had to actually implement a custom HA integration that creates a media center where the Activities in our framework became sources in order to be able to use the Astrion in its current software state at all.
The buttons we are missing the most are the ones above the dpad on a Harmony Elite: Playback control, stop, exit. Yes, the Astrion looks much sleeker than a Harmony Elite but you also waste quite a lot of space at the bottom of the remote that could house a few more buttons.
Thank you again for such detailed feedback.
One thing that really stood out to us is your description of RosCard as something closer to a dashboard runtime rather than simply a configuration tool. That’s an interesting way of looking at it, and it’s actually quite close to some of the discussions we’ve been having internally.
You’re also absolutely right that the current TV Card is carrying a lot of UI that many advanced users don’t actually need. It was originally designed as a general-purpose starting point, but as people build more sophisticated Home Assistant setups, the desire for configurable interfaces becomes much stronger.
Regarding the physical buttons, it’s interesting that you mentioned the Harmony buttons above the D-pad. We’ve heard similar comments from a few other users, especially those coming from Harmony Elite. It’s definitely useful feedback for us because it helps separate “buttons people expect” from “buttons people actually miss every day.”
One thing we’re trying to figure out is where the balance should be between fixed hardware controls and software-defined controls. There are strong arguments for both, and discussions like this are incredibly valuable while we’re exploring that direction.
Yes, one can see how the TV card might have come to fruition. But honestly if it were designed as a general purpose starting point for less exprienced users that would explain even less why you’re duplicating physical buttons instead of giving those inexperienced users additional controls. It right now is the only officially supported way to get any physical button back to HA at all if I’m not completely wrong.
One way to help people coming from Harmony right now would be to either put those buttons in the touch screen per default since you cannot add buttons to the current devices people like me are using or allow a configurable touch screen interface.
Even if you discard users like me who simply cannot add any physical buttons to their current Astrions, I think that allowing for properly configurable virtual buttons on the touch screen is much more valuable than maybe releasing a further hardware version with more buttons.
I cannot imagine that it would more difficult to implement a flexible native touch screen interface than it would be to release another hardware release and deal with the disgruntled owners of the current hardware.
Agree with this sentiment.