Google Assistant: Scenes available for main user, but not other household members

Third party integrations
1

I’m having trouble exposing all the scenes and scripts that I see in Google Home/Google Assistant using the Google Assistant integration to other members of my household.

I set up the manual Google Assistant integration, and went through the steps listed in the documentation to add additional household members, and it’s working really well for my account. I can see everything that’s set up in the Home Assistant config file, including scenes and scripts when I add them to Routines.

The problem is with other household members. I’ve added them to the Home in Google and to the app on the Google Cloud control panels per the instructions, and they are able to see basic devices, like switches, but they don’t have access to scenes or scripts. When I try to add a scene to a routine in one of the other user’s Google Home app (on iOS), the Scene option is greyed out.

So far, to figure out what’s going on, I’ve made the other user an app owner in the Google dev console, I’ve run the “Google sync my devices” command from both accounts, and I’ve removed them from the home and re-added them. I’m at a loss now, so if anyone has any ideas, I’d love the assistance.

Thanks!

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This is only a semi-qualified answer as I haven’t tried it myself and don’t even know where to set this exactly, but I read that you need to assign the scripts / scenes to rooms for other members to be able to access them. Maybe that points in a useful direction.

1 Like
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I have confirmed you do need to add the scene to a room for other users to be able to see them and use them in Google Assistant. You can use the “entity_config” config option to specify a room. In the following example, I have a scene “scene.dinner” and am assigning it to the “Kitchen” room in Google Assistant.

google_assistant:
  ...  
  entity_config:    
    scene.dinner:
      room: Kitchen
4 Likes
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For anyone else with this issue, I posted an update to this in a slightly more recent thread here:

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5

Hi Brady,

I am a home assistant newbie :slight_smile:

The code you added, where did you put that? In the config or ???

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In the main configuration file, adjacent to the “google_assistant” config block, whereever you have that defined.

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Another total newbie here: my config file is mostly empty (I’m using a version of HA where the configuration settings have gone to the GUI), and pasting these options in there doesn’t work. There are no pre-existing settings for google_assitant in the config file at all. Any idea how to add these?

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Hi David

This was from when all the Google config was in YAML but you are right that doesn’t correspond to your setup. I think you should just need to manually set an Area for the script in the front end. Here is the scripts that shows up for my wife in Google as a scene. Note it has an Area set of Hallway:

image

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Thanks a lot for the reply! I did give that a go, but it still didn’t seem to add the scene for other users. I also tried to add it to various different rooms, in case there was an issue with Google Home failing to identify a particular HA Area as corresponding to one of the rooms it recognises.

This documentation page says that “Entities that have not been explicitly assigned to rooms but have been placed in Home Assistant areas will return room hints to Google with the devices in those areas”. I’m not sure what a “hint” is, but I wonder whether it is different from actually assigning them to those rooms using the “room:” setting.

I should say that it is very frustrating that Google Home no longer allows you to even see routines without going into an automation setup menu. What were they thinking? Crazy that we have to go into HA to fix this.

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I just ran into this as well. Simply adding the script to an area fixed it for me. It is indeed really unexpected. I see that those docs now have a note about this, but it’s unlikely you’d see that unless you went looking for it.

Some devices, such as scene or script, must be assigned to an area before other members of a shared Google Home Household can use them. This is because household members in a shared Google Home will not be able to view devices that are not assigned to a room unless they were the user who linked the service to Google Home. This issue isn’t immediately apparent because script and scene devices aren’t visible in the main Google Home dashboard.
The automatic room assignment will not work when multiple homes are set up in your Google account.

Unfortunately this seems like an issue on Google’s side.

1 Like
11

I had this same issue as well where scripts would work for me but not my wife. Once I added an area to the room under the google assistant config, everything works great.

Thank you all for your help!

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Are you using nabu casa? I’ve tried assigning it to an area in home assistant, and tried different rooms like you did but I still get the same issue - scenes/scripts do not show up on her device