I have successfully set up Google assistant to work with my home assistant installation. I can see all my devices in the home control settings page and assign them to rooms.
However, I’m a bit confused as to the best way of doing this. I have a bunch of lights and switches (zwave) that mostly control lights. Most of them have the word “light” in the name and it seems to work fine. What is not working seems to be my use of groups. I have a group simply called “kitchen” in which I put all the lights in the kitchen. I signed this group to the “kitchen” room in the home control, but when I ask Google assistant to switch on or off the lights in the kitchen, she responds that she does not know to what I am referring. I have tried to give the group an alias inside Google assistant (both “kitchen” and “light”), but without any success.
Also, what’s the best way to add a sensor like a temperature sensor or humidity sensor?
Is there some sort of guide somewhere that summarises what switches and sensors should be called to be correctly recognised by Google?
I have found some of the very long threads on the Google assistant topic here in the messageboard, but they are way too long to be able to glean anything from without significant effort…
I am still playing with this, but when you expose groups from HASS to Assistant, most “Groups” people sometimes use are groups like rooms. these would be duplicated in GA. ie: You have a kitchen group in HASS, and a room named Kitchen is GA, and put everything in there. Then call GA to turn off the"Kitchen" lights, and it says, turning off XX devices, when you only wanted a single light as an example. Light groups are different and can be added to rooms in GA, but I would keep groups out of rooms in GA from my experience so far.
Other than linking my Hass to Google Assistant, I didn’t do any other setup in the Google Home app such as assigning rooms etc. I have my kitchen light called exactly that, ‘kitchen light’, so when I ask Google to turn On the kitchen light, she knows exactly which light to turn on. When I ask for the lounge TV to be turned ON, she knows which TV because its actually called ‘lounge TV’ in Hass. No need to use ‘rooms’ in the Google Home app. Using ‘groups’ in Hass will then also let you ask Google to turn ON or OFF multiple things in a room.
Other people might have other ideas but this seem simple to me since I let Hass do all the thinking regarding what things are called vs. where they are and Google Assistant just uses the names to work things out.
Where I came to grief was that I had a Wemo switch exposed to assistant and GA also had native support for the Wemo switch so if they had the same name, Google Home didn’t know Which wemo I was referring to. Complicated by them being in the same room.
I fixed it by not exposing that switch to the GA component in HA.
wouldn’t Google Home only include it natively if you told it to be part of your Google Home automation system though? eg: I have Yeelights which are supported by Google Home but I never used the Google Home app to include the Yeelights so I don’t have any dramas with Google getting confused with duplicate devices. Not yet anyway…
Of course. I had the Wemo setup before the Google Assistant integration and was using IFTTT with no issues.
Still no issues as I exclude that switch and also my Yeelight from the Google HA integration. Then if HA falls over for any reason I still have native control.
