Google home - ask a question with HA and wait for a human answer?

Feature Requests
1

Hello,

Do you think that it is possible to :

  • use HA for detecting a external input such as (rain, storm, snow, someone unknown in the house, someone at the door, …)
    then
  • TTS the situation with google home
    and then
  • waiting for an answer like “yes/no/OK…”
    and then
  • do the appropriate action

?

It did not find any way to do that…

Thanks for you help :slight_smile:

2

That specific pattern is not possible at all with Google Home (or Alexa).

3

I saw that it can be possible with snips.ai but I was searching to make it works with Google home.

Thanks :slight_smile:

4

Yeah. It’s not possible with Google Home. Google Home’s API doesn’t allow for this kind of interaction from anything. And, to my knowledge, there are not even any native google skills/apps that use this kind of functionality. The only exceptions are:

  1. Alarms, which are handled locally, and don’t actually ask a question and wait for an answer, they just make noise.

  2. Notifications, which tell you that you have a notification, but you still have to ask to hear them.

  3. broadcasts, which can be replied to.

On second thought, I guess you could hack it in using broadcasts. It would be a lot of steps though.

You’d have to build a Google Assistant Device (there’s an SDK for this).

Then have it use the broadcast feature (exactly the same as saying “hey google, broadcast it’s hot in the living room. would you like me to turn on the air conditioner”).

All the Google Home devices would announce “broadcast from Daniel, it’s hot in the living room. would you like me to turn on the air conditioner”.

At which would you could say “ok google, reply with yes”.

And then your process acting as the Google Assistant device could get the reply and do something about it.

5

To be more specific, you’ve posted this in “Feature Requests”, which makes me understand that you don’t this isn’t possible now but that you want a Home Assistant developer to build this functionality.

What I’m trying to tell you is it’s not possible for a Home Assistant developer to add this feature because Google Home doesn’t allow it. There are hacky, workaround kind of ways to make something like this happen, but, the feature, as you’ve requested it, is not possible today. Maybe some day Google will open their devices up a bit more.

6

To be honnest, I just posted that there because I don’t know where to post it. It’s an idea I had these days and I found no way to implement it.

Posting that there is also a way to say that someone else has the same idea but no implementation is possible at the moment without many hacks.

Thanks for your contribution and your deep feedback on my idea.

1 Like
7

It is actually possible with Alexa, you need to login to the cloud dev portal, register your alexa device, create a new skill and configure some stuff to pass to your home assistant. I have set it up and it works great.

you can have it ask you a yes/no question, or provide a number or keyword, then have your automations do something based on that response. This is true home assistance.