Google assistant, HA Covers, voice and security

As I understand it (and I probably do not), there are some things google assistant will do for you by voice match, and not do for guests in your home. Maybe. I am struggling to find that written down, I can find “guest mode” but that seems to be for streaming.

Here is the fundamental question: I have garage doors controlled by HA (though MyQ) which are in turn controlled by Google Assistant through the nubu cloud.

Is there a way I can fix it so GA only opens the door if it thinks it is my voice, not someone else in my house.

Or… as I found out this week when my son visited and experimented - standing outside the door and shouting loud enough to be heard inside, and the door opened. [Note to any thieves reading this - that mini is no longer in the garage.]

Is this a side effect of the pass through HA, if MyQ was direct would GA know to be more secure? Or is there a setting somewhere I am missing?

Interestingly if I ask my phone it requires the phone be unlocked first, but if it can hear a voice from outside, the door just opens.

Yes, I have numerous solutions to this including disabling that device in HA’s cloud, turning off the mic, etc. Which I will do as an alternative.

But is this how it is supposed to work? Is there a way to at least wrap it in an attempt at voice recognition?

Or is voice recognition not about identity just understanding words, in GA?

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I have a similar issue with Alexa, is had a similar feature where it should be able to tell between voices but is considered unfinished/beta right now so do not want to rely on that yet.

I actually use HA scripts to open and close the door myself, and I can add in things like checking people are home, and having TTS messages when the door is open/closed but I’m also looking for a better solution.

Another option is to change what you say to open the door, maybe add a password on the end, so instead of ‘open door’ you say ‘open door hunter two’ or something like that, you could change once per week but it would be a pain and again not very secure.

The only way I see to change what I say to open the door is not send the cover item to google (i.e. the cloud), and instead send a script over. So I could create a script “Make me a ham sandwich” that opens the door, and there would not be an cover. That means, though, I can’t see if the door is open by asking GA. That’s not a crisis, I could look inside the HA Luci screen.

I can pretty easily get the minis far enough away from an opening that standing outside and yelling will not work, I think. But I am curious whether it’s supposed to be this way – is GA supposed to reserve some commands for a recognized voice or not, and if so how to make cover control such a command?

How do you have your Google Assistant hooked up to HA? I have a MyQ garage door opener and I use Nabu Casa to connect to Google Assistant.

You can required a spoken pin code to open the garage door. Enter a PIN code on the Google Assistant setup page and make sure the Disable Two Factor Authentication toggle is off on your cover entity.

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I set a pin code, did a sync my devices, did a restart of HA just in case and…

How do you get the “Disabled two factor” to appear? Neither garage door has that line, only the expose line (which is on). I can still open the door without the code.

Are you running latest version of Home Assistant?

Almost, I’m on 0.102.1 and latest is 0.102.3, but leaving home for a while and didn’t want to risk breaking something just before leaving. I didn’t see anything in the last two point releases that should matter.

Are you using configuration.yaml or the new gui front end for configurations? Is there something I should have added to the cloud configuration in configuration.yaml? All I have there are a bunch of excluded entities (things already in google home like minis) and entity configurations (to specify some rooms as defaults). Nothing about security or pins there.

Hmm. Yeah I’m pretty sure it just showed up after an update a couple of versions ago. I don’t recall doing anything to enable it. I was using the UI configuration but I got tired of disabling automatically enabled entities so I went back to manual. I don’t have anything unusual in the MyQ integration. The garage PIN works on both. I have a Chamberlain opener but I don’t think that should matter. I poked around in the Google Home app to see if there was anything in there, didn’t see anything. I even did some googling and couldn’t come up with anything.

If I think of anything else I’ll get back to you. If you figure it out post your solution here!