Better device naming? GA: "Sure, turning on Lights Light"

Configuration
1

Apparently I’m not naming my devices in the way that the Home Assistant to Google Home integration expects. For example, I have an area named “Front Porch” and in this area I have assigned a light switch which I have named “Lights”. Using the Google Assistant integration for Home Assistant Cloud, I have linked my Home Assistant to my Google Home app.

Here’s the problem, in the Google Home app, after the devices are synced, my front porch lights show up as “Lights Light” and when I ask Google Assistant to “set the front porch lights to 25%”, it will respond with “Sure! Setting the Lights Light brightness to 25%.” Which I find extremely annoying. How can/should I be naming my devices such that Google Assistant uses sane names, like “Sure! Setting the Front Porch lights to 25%.”?

Google Home device:

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IMG_1220.PNG1125×584 57.3 KB

2

Give it a frientdy name :

google_assistant:
  project_id: xxx
  service_account: !include xxx
  report_state: true
  exposed_domains:
    - light  
  expose_by_default: true
    light.lights
      name: Front Porch
3

I have a similar problem when naming the lights as suggested. There’s no such thing as a sensible name for the central lights in a room, other than the name of the room. So the lights in the bedroom are named bedroom, or the lights in the front porch are named front porch.

But here’s the thing: I used to do that, and then Google decided the room name was more important than the light name. So frequently it would perform commands on the entire room and not the one light. And usually there’s more lights in the room, and usually ones that I only use occasionally too. I want to be able to control each individual light. Adding “light” after the name didn’t help, because of the “smart” sentence decomposition by Google. Neither did any other synonyms for light I could dream up.

It got me to rename the rooms to rather weird names, but I do not like the solution at all. That messes with room level commands. How do you all get aroud that? Or is it just that I have way too many voice controllable lights :slight_smile:

4

Okay I figured out that for me, the best solution seems to be overriding the name of a device in Home Assistant by

  1. Go to Settings
  2. Click Devices & Services
  3. Click the devices link in the Zigbee Home Automation card
  4. For each device I want to set a more sane name for, that will propagate to Google Assistant
    1. Click the device
    2. Click the name of the control I want to rename
    3. In the pop-up window, click the Settings cog
    4. Type in the name I want Google Assistant to use for the device in the Name field
    5. Click UPDATE
  5. Ask Google Assistant to re-sync devices with “Okay Google, sync my devices”

Now, when I ask Google to “set the front porch lights to 25%”, it responds with “Okay! Setting the lights brightness to 25%.” instead of lights light.

5

You can also opt to change the name of the light in Google Home. But if you ever need to break the link and establish a new link, you’d have to do the renaming again. So the above is indeed the best way.

From the screenshot in Google Home it appears the light was actually named “Lights light” in Google Home. Something I cannot reproduce: none of my lights have a prefix or postfix with light in Google Home. Could you have renamed it by accident in Google Home?

6

I never once tried to rename the devices via the Google Home app. So I also cannot explain the odd postfix naming behavior. I simply assumed that it was some quirk of the Home Assistant to Google Assistant integration in that a device control would be automatically named with a concatenation of the Home Assistant entity name and device type.