I Gave a Smart Home Assistant an Upgraded Brain and Personality

My heating wasn't working, so I tried the Hive smart home assistant. It can actually check your thermostat via API — pretty cool. It also takes 70 seconds to respond. And when you tell it you're unhappy, it says: "I notice you seem unhappy." So I rebuilt it. You can try it yourself: 👉 Launch the demo on Hello Rasa 👉 GitHub repo The Problems 1. Painfully slow Every response — even "hello" — took 10-12 seconds. The API call took 70 seconds with no feedback. Just... waiting. 2. Dead ends Ask something out of scope and you get: "Sorry, I cannot answer." Full stop. No alternatives. No path forward. 3. Inconsistent capabilities It checked my thermostat once. Then later, when I asked explicitly, it said it couldn't check the thermostat. Same bot. Same session. Trust: broken. 4. Robotic tone "I notice you seem unhappy" sounds like a sentiment classifier readout, not a conversation. The Fixes Instant acknowledgment The fix is simple — acknowledge immediately, then do the slow work: flows : chec