I built an MCP server for my voice assistant. By default, Home Assistant offers a few tools to the models, but I felt like it was missing some, so I built it.

It has tools to get real jokes, do math, unit conversion, get stock information, search the web with Kagi, and other things I consider to be essential in a voice assistant. It even got approved by my wife.

At work I use our MCP server to debug and troubleshoot issues with our code too. Just yesterday I used it to figure out why a tag wasn’t showing up in traces; using the MCP server, the LLM was able to see that the tag was present in parent traces, but was lost along the way, and figured out why.

Could I find that without the MCP server? Yes, but I’d take me hours of going through lengthy traces, while the MCP and LLM found the issue in minutes.

I use MCP for a voice assistant as well.

I got a Pebble Index 01 ring and it has support for custom MCP servers. I run one on Tailscale and it can interact with Home Assistant, my home issue tracker, my Anki setup, etc.

I've come full circle on MCP. With agents with a shell tool they quickly became unnecessary but these days I've been coming up with more agentic use cases where I don't want to give the agent a shell, and a narrower MCP interface is a great fit.