Google Assistant- Home Assistant "connection" is unreliable (Looking for some help with how to troubleshoot)

[wtstreetglow (Weston)]

Hello all,

Could someone that is knowledgeable in the subject connection help me determine if there is anyway to make this connection more reliable.

How do I determine if it is the ddns service causing the issue or something else between home assistant- google home?

I currently use duckdns with nginx proxy.

Essentially whats happening is I’ll get random “home assistant not responding” when asking google to do something. Maybe 5 minutes later, I’ll ask the same thing and it’ll work fine. It’s definitely kind of annoying.

Of course, like everyone, my goal is to be a cheapo and hopefully not spend any money.

Thank you all for any advice, direction you all can give me. It will be very much appreciated!!

[Pippyn]

A lot of users have problems with the reliability of duckdns in the past month.

No longer a stable connection via duckdns domain

Since October 1st my connection with my HA machine using my duckdns-URL is really unstable, most of the times I get an error message (see examples below). In the last months I have seen this before but only for 1 or 2 hours, now it has been bugging me for almost an entire day. If I use my local IP I can still reach my machine. Scenario #1 - DuckDNS iOS app - NOT OK action: on iPhone I open the iOS companion app using my DuckDNS URL (https://MYSUBDOMAIN.duckdns.org:8123) via my home network (w…

Maybe switch to another solution? I switch to a cloudfrared tunnel

[wtstreetglow (Weston)]

Thank you for the link and suggestion. I will look into that solution also.

[Dalmas (Per-Olov Håkansson)]

Have the same issue with google assistent and random when is working or not. Did you came up with something I can try as well? change DuckDNS?

[sylvain48]

Hey
I have the exact same issue with google assistant and duckdns. I just switched my config to using nginx in order to enable local fulfillement for google assistant.

This is mostly working (90% of queries to google assistant are now working compared to 10% in the last days). And the speed also seems faster.

While investigating the remainig issues I have found in the google assistant logs that the error observed by google assistant when trying to reach my home assistant instance is:

externalDebugString: “Error querying agent backend. State: URL_TIMEOUT, reason: TIMEOUT_DNSLOOKUP”

This error is pointing directly to a timeout while doing the dns lookup.
I found this website to test dns resolution: DNS Lookup tool, Reverse DNS lookup tool - www.DNSWatch.info

I was shocked to see that my url in xxxx.duckdns.org is failing to be resolved on multiple duckdns servers. This explains the timeout observed by google assistant.

I am looking to alternatives to duckdns as this issue is lasting since several days now.

[Dalmas (Per-Olov Håkansson)]

yes me too, this thread also blame duckDNS for the problems.

Google Assistant Keeps losing connection with Home Assistant

Hello there. Im using Home assistant for a long time now. I have setup Google Assistant manually using a test app like described. Sadly a month or 2 ago the google assistant gets problems communicating. Then it works then it doesnt and states. Sorry cannot reach the assistant try again later. weird enough this happens a lot now preventing the use of almost the entire home at that moment for my blind GF Do anyone have the same issue or had it before that solved it. i walked throug…

[flequi19]

did you solve it?

[wtstreetglow (Weston)]

no solution but I do think it is duckdns related. I ended up just switching all of my verbal stuff to siri/ homekit.

[coling (Colin)]

Just as a point of reference here, I had my DNS hosted in a slightly odd way - split between my own nameservers from my company (which were static and controlled via git and various other automations) and duckdns to control a whole subdomain via a CNAME record. I did this to allow me to use SWAG as a reverse proxy with DNS authentication for the Let’s Encrypt certificate. It worked - technically!

However, this means that my HA domain actually required two lookups one to get the CNAME from the domains root servers, and then secondly to get the actual duckdns.org domain.

When turning on Debug logging on my manual Google Assistant’s action, I saw error log payloads with DNS timeout.

I changed the whole thing over to Cloudflare and haven’t had a single issue so far.

So DNS timeouts are a real thing and DuckDNS seemed, in general, to be quite unreliable for me (not just in the double lookup thing, but often not even being able to find the site to login on my computer too).