Greetings
How Mirra greets people — the greeting widget on the glass, the spoken greeting when a screen recognises somebody, and the rules, quiet hours and cooldown that decide what is said and when.
The line on the glass costs nothing and needs no assistant. The spoken greeting is an assistant turn like any other and draws on your monthly assistant credits; when the month's allowance is gone, the mirror stops greeting people out loud.
Two kinds of greeting
Mirra greets people in two unrelated ways, and most questions about greetings turn out to be about which one you mean.
The Greeting widget is text on the glass. It shows a headline that changes with the time of day, and an optional smaller line beneath it. It needs no camera, no microphone and no credits — without a camera it uses the household's own messages instead of anybody's personal one, which is all a shared kitchen screen usually wants.
The spoken greeting is the assistant talking to you unprompted because a screen recognised you. It needs the camera, an enrolled face and two switches, and it obeys quiet hours and a cooldown. Quiet hours and the cooldown do nothing to the widget: the words on the glass are not the mirror speaking, and silencing the mirror at night does not blank them.
Putting the greeting on a screen
Open the screen
Screens in the top bar, then the screen you want. The scene editor opens on the first of that screen's scenes — pick the one you want the greeting on before you add it.
Find Household under Add widget
The palette below the canvas groups widgets by category. Greeting sits under Household.
Press + Greeting
It lands on the canvas at eight columns by three rows, in the first free space, and is selected for you. Drag it where you want it.
Fill in the settings
The panel headed “Greeting settings” appears below the canvas whenever the widget is selected.
Press Save & push
Nothing reaches the screen until you do. The header reads “Unsaved changes” until you save and “Saved & pushed ✓” afterwards.
The headline
Before noon Mirra uses the morning list; from noon onwards it uses the afternoon and evening list. There is no third list — the widget divides the day in two, and only the spoken greeting distinguishes evening from afternoon.
Each list holds up to five lines, one message per line. Mirra picks one per day per period, so the wording changes when the day does and never while somebody is reading it. Write {name} anywhere in a line and it is replaced with the greeting name of whoever the screen currently recognises — and with nothing at all when it recognises nobody, so a line built around it reads oddly on a screen with no camera.
When a screen recognises somebody who has a personal greeting of their own, that replaces the list entirely.
The widget renders nothing at all when the headline and the subtext are both empty. That is how you build a greeting that speaks up only on the days a rule fires: clear both message lists and add rules.
Greeting settings
Alongside these fields sit the appearance and visibility controls every widget has — layer, surface, alignment, size and opacity, a time window, which days it shows, and “Only when” for presence. They behave the same for every widget and are covered in the scene editor.
Building the subtext
The subtext is the smaller line under the headline, and it can come from one of two places — “Where the subtext comes from” decides which.
Rules are the default and the original: the screen reads your list from the top and shows the first rule whose condition is true right now. Order is the whole idea — “Nothing on today” has to sit above “It's a weekday”, or it will never be reached.
Insights are the house's own observations, worked out from Home Assistant rather than written by you: a window open with rain coming, lights left on when everybody is out. Choose “An insight if there is one, otherwise the rules” and the line answers whichever is true — the observation when there is something worth saying, your own words the rest of the time. An insight always wins, because it is the only line here asking somebody to go and do something, and a warning outranks a pleasantry.
Press + Add a rule
A new rule starts as “Otherwise (always true)” with no text.
Choose the condition
The dropdown lists the eight conditions in the order they read.
Type the line
The field marked “What it says…” holds the exact words the screen will show.
Order the rules with ↑ and ↓
↑ tries this rule earlier, ↓ later. Specific conditions belong at the top, general ones at the bottom.
Remove a rule with ✕
There is no confirmation — a rule is one line of text and re-adding it is quicker than asking.
A rule with no text yet is kept exactly where you left it and skipped on the screen, so a half-finished one can sit there as a placeholder without ever showing a blank line. It used to be discarded the moment it was created, which is why pressing + Add a rule appeared to do nothing at all; that is fixed. The subtext can also move. “Does the subtext move?” offers scroll left, scroll right, or up a line at a time, with its own pace in seconds — worth turning on when the line is longer than the widget, or when insights and rules together have more than one thing to say. It stands still unless you ask, so every greeting already on a wall looks exactly as it did.
The conditions, and what each one tests
The widget fetches only what its rules ask for. With no calendar condition in the list it never reads your calendar; with no rain rule it never asks for a forecast. It refreshes every ten minutes, and immediately when a connected calendar tells Mirra it has changed.
The rain rule asks for a forecast at a fixed location in the north-east of England. The Greeting has no coordinates field, and it does not read the ones on the Weather widget — so on a screen anywhere else, treat that rule as a rough signal rather than a local forecast.
Personal greetings
A personal greeting belongs to the person rather than to a screen, so it is set once and every screen in the house uses it.
Open Household
In the top bar. Find the person's card.
Fill in Morning, Afternoon and evening, or both
The placeholders show the shape of one — “Morning, Adam!”. Up to 200 characters each.
Click away from the field
It saves when the field loses focus, not on every keystroke. Emptying a field clears the personal greeting rather than storing a blank, and the household's list takes over again.
A personal greeting appears only on screens with the camera on that have enrolled that person, and only while the widget's “When someone is recognised” is set to use it. {name} works inside a personal greeting too, though there is rarely much point.
The spoken greeting
When a screen recognises somebody and they stay in view for the linger time, it tells Mirra. Mirra then decides whether to speak, in this order: the screen's auto-greet must be on; the face must be one it recognises; that person must not have opted out; the time must be outside quiet hours; and the cooldown since the last greeting for that person on that screen must have passed. Every refusal is silent — the sighting is recorded and nothing is said.
When it does speak, the assistant is handed a short factual brief — what is left in the diary today, upcoming reminders, open tasks, tomorrow's diary if it is evening, and any message somebody left for that person — and asked to greet them by name and summarise it in a sentence or two. It is not a script, so the wording differs every time.
- A face it cannot place is never greeted, however everything else is set.
- A message waiting for somebody beats the cooldown, and beats nothing else. Quiet hours, a personal opt-out and a screen with auto-greet off all still hold — those are somebody saying they do not want to be spoken to, and a message is not an exception to that.
- A waiting message is marked delivered when the brief is sent, not when the mirror finishes speaking. Repeating a message every time somebody walks past is a worse failure than missing one once.
Quiet hours, cooldown and the rest of the timing
These controls live on the Presence panel of each screen — Screens, then the screen — except the per-person switch, which is on the Household page. They are per screen on purpose: a bedroom mirror can be silent from nine while the kitchen has no quiet hours at all.
Quiet hours are judged against the screen's own clock, reported by the screen itself, rather than against the server's. A household that sets 22:00 means ten at night in that hall.
When the greeting says nothing
- Blank widget: the headline and the subtext are both empty. An empty message list plus no matching rule renders nothing at all — that is by design, not a fault.
- Always the generic line: the screen has no camera switched on, nobody is enrolled on it, or “When someone is recognised” is set to always use the lists.
- The right name, the wrong person: only the strongest face detection in the frame is considered, so in a room with several people the mirror picks one of them.
- A rule that never fires: something above it is always true. An “Otherwise” rule makes everything below it unreachable.
- Calendar conditions that never match: the rules read the same connected calendars as the rest of Mirra, and an empty agenda is an empty agenda.
- Nothing spoken, ever: check both auto-greet switches, quiet hours, the cooldown, and whether this month's assistant credits have run out.
Related
- People and presenceHow to add a household member, enrol their face on a screen, and understand what Mirra stores about them and where recognition actually happens.
- Every widget there isThe complete list of widgets Mirra ships with, grouped the way the scene editor groups them, with what each one shows and what it needs before it will show anything.
- The scene editorThe scene editor is where you arrange a screen's widgets on a twelve-column grid, watch the real widgets render behind them, and push the result to the wall.
- Screen settingsEvery setting on a screen's own page that belongs to the screen rather than to a scene — its shape, which way up it is, its camera and gestures, the commands you can send it, and unpairing.
- Moments — messages left for peopleA moment is a short message left with the mirror for somebody in your household, passed on out loud the next time that person is recognised.
- The assistant: how a conversation worksHow you summon Mirra, what happens between hearing you and answering you, which tools it can reach, where the transcript goes, and what a conversation costs against your monthly allowance.
- A calendar is empty or out of dateWhy a calendar widget shows nothing — an expired authorisation, a changed password, the wrong kind of URL, a date range with nothing in it, or a refresh that has not come round yet.