Essential doubt about Home Assistant

Installation
#1

Hi everyone :slight_smile:

I am new on the forum so greetings to everyone.

I have a question and I apologize in advance if it’s to dumb or this have been asked before, but I have searched on the forum and through the Internet and I didn’t find anything too useful which helped me clear my mind.

I have been using a Raspberry Pi 3 for a few years as a media center, retropie and as a server to download with qbittorrent and amule. Recently I have purchased a RPi4 and I have been looking about things to do with it and discovered about Home Assistant.

My question is: what would be the difference between google home and Home Assistant? I know google assistant is like a software and it’s not possible automatization from there, but for what I understand, with Google Home (I never had one before btw) you can automate several stuff. There are also applications like IFTTT which allows some automatization too.

Not only that, but my biggest doubt comes when I see it’s possible to integrate Home Assistant with IFTTT, Alexa, Google Assistant and similar, which has me completely lost.

So what’d be the difference between HA and Google Home or similar? I am not very good at this topic but I really would like to try Home Assistant for my house, but I want to be sure I am not missing anything about the utility of HA.

Thank you very much y’all and I apologize if the question is to dumb but I am quite an amateur on this and I am just starting.

#2

Alberto,
i am new here as well… so i cant go that tecnical! but from my perspective, is that with HA you have no limits! if you are a creative guy and with time to spare! your dreams are your limits!
you can integrate everything!
my example i have google home, HA, Apple HomeKit, z-wave devices, Bluetooth devices all integrated together!
so i use HA as the brains and then the several other smart hubs as a front to make them easy and real life usage for the careless and for those that just want things to operate without any issue

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#3

Probably the best thing about Home Assistant is, your data stays within your home. If you want to integrate cloud-based devices like Google Home, that is possible and is entirely your decision. Now, the learning curve may seem steep, but it’s easier today than it was two years ago. I don’t know everything (who does, really?) about it, in fact, far from it. But I love to automate things and tinker with electronics, and Home Assistant makes it a joy.

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#4

IFTTT is not an application, it is a third party cloud service, and it has no functionality if your internet connection drops.

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#5

Thank you very much for your answer Soccs

For what understand, it’s possible to use only Home Assistant and for example Google Assistant (but without Google Home or Apple Homekit), right? I mean you can use Home Assistant with Google Assistant only but Google Home is to make it easy to other people within your household

#6

Thank you very much for your answer Fred the Frog,

So I understand using Home Assistant without Google Home/ Apple Homekit or similar devices, all your information stays inside the raspberry pi or the device where you have installed Home Assistant

Thank you!

#7

Thank you very much for your answer Richieframe

But Home Assistant can be also download from the Play Store… If the internet drops will I not have problems with Home Assistant too? Even if I have it all on the Home Assistant Cloud?

#8

That’s just a companion app. An interface to talk to your home assistant server.
Nothing is stored in home assistant cloud. That’s just another interface

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#9

Home Assistant Cloud is a paid service by NabuCasa that makes it easy to access your Home Assistant remotely and to integrate Google and Alexa with Home Assistant. Doing all of that manually is a lot of work.

See Remote access and Google Assistant and Alexa to get an idea about much work it is to manually set those up.

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#10

The Home Assistant app on the Play store will not work remotely if you do not have remote access setup or you do not have Home Assistant Cloud. If you do not have those setup then you can only use that app while locally connected to the same network as your Home Assistant. You don’t have to have the app to do that. You can use a browser on your phone to do that. One of the pros of the app is getting a device tracker if you want it enabled.

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#11

Adding Google Assistant to Home Assistant allows you to control devices on your Home Assistant through voice commands and/or routines through Google Home and Google Assistant.

I think most of us prefer the Home Assistant UI on our phone as opposed to the Google Home app on our phone to control our devices since the UI is so highly configurable.

The reasons that I care to have Google integrated into Home Assistant is being able to use voice commands to control zigbee and zwave lights and to control media devices such as Roku, Sonos, and TVs through multiple Harmony Hubs and to have TTS to make announcements on specific automations. I couldn’t have zigbee and zwave lights controllable through Google Home and I couldn’t have multiple Harmony Hubs through Google Home without Home Assistant.

Another pro with with Home Assistant is I also have InfluxDB and Grafana to allow graphing of historical data which I like to have. Home Assistant also has a logbook. You can’t get that with Google Home.

I also have a utility meter to monitor power usage in the house. That is not possible with Google Home either. There are several ways to be able to do that in Home Assistant.

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#12

If you watch several YouTube videos you will understand quite easily. But remember this is not a comercial product, so many bugs and also the biggest bug it’s you! If you make mistakes, it will reflect on the health of your system !

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#13

I personally would avoid watching any YouTube videos. They are almost all out of date.
Just read the docs.

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