Google Assistant integration with HA 0.65.0?

Configuration
1

I’ve been an IFTTT user for a couple of years, mainly for the integration that it offers for my Google Home devices (i.e. voice controlling my HA devices), but don’t want to move to an IFTTT subscription. I currently run Home Assistant 0.65.0 in a Docker container on a Lubuntu VM.
Having taken some first steps trying to integrate Home Assistant with Google Assistant/Google Home a couple of years ago, I couldn’t get it to work reliably (hence why I ended up using IFTTT). I was wondering if newer versions of Home Assistant offered better/easier integration with Google Assistant/Google Home?
I’ve avoided any upgrades to Home Assistant so far as I don’t want to spend hours/days dealing with backwards compatibility issues with my HA config (and I already have it doing everything I need anyway). However if a newer release would offer an easy path to Google integration I think now might be the time to take the plunge.
I was wondering if anyone could advise:

  1. Does the current HA release offer significantly better or easier Google integration than v0.65.0?
  2. How straightforward would the HA upgrade process be from 0.65.0 to current version?
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  1. Well, you already, in theory, have access to cloud, but I suspect that you’re so far behind it won’t work.
  2. You’re fifty releases behind. Straightforward is hopeful :wink:

How easy the upgrade is will depend entirely on the integrations you use, and what breaking changes you’ll be impacted by. I’d expect you’re about to discover that putting off upgrades was false economy.

Now, another option might be to use this custom component and a second HA instance. Then you can migrate things in a controlled manner rather than trying to have to manage that upgrade.

3

I’m not really interested in a subscription service, so Cloud wouldn’t be a good solution for me.
So does the current version of HA offer better/easier integration with Google Home/Assistant if I don’t use Cloud? If it doesn’t then I don’t really have a reason to upgrade HA.
I suspect that each HA upgrade would consume at least a couple of hours, so if I’m fifty releases behind then I’ve saved myself a minimum of 100 hours. I’d say that was a worthwhile economy!

4

Well, it’s still Google Assistant - you’ve just got better features.

It’ll never be easy, because Google keep changing things so the docs are often out of date as soon as they’re updated.

5

It would be honestly faster to make a backup of your configuration, then wipe your current system and rebuild it starting at the current release, then add back in each part of your old configuration and fixing things as needed.

6

So Google Assistant is better or different in the current HA release than it was in 0.65.0? Just don’t want to commit to a major upgrade unless it gives better Google integration

7

There’s some new features, like having HA push entity state updates to Google (so that Google Home shows if a light is on, for example). If you just want it for voice control there’s no major changes I remember - at least on the HA end.

8

Thanks for clarifying. Pushing entity states to Google isn’t on my wishlist - I really only want to trigger HA switches and scripts using my Google Home devices - so it sounds like I just need to replace all of my IFTTT applets with HA Google Assistant commands. I suppose I’ll be restricted in my choice of commands to “on”/“off” etc, rather than the unlimited choice of phrases I had with IFTTT, but I guess that’s the price of going with the subscription-free option.