Google Home cannot reach Home Assistant

Hello everybody!

I’ve been using Google Home to command Home Assistant for a good 3 years now. Everything was mostly OK, except for the occasional “cannot reach Home Assistant at the moment”. It was happening in maybe 5% of the times. So I thought of trying out HA Cloud for a month. Given the flawless experience, I got the high management’s (AKA wife) approval for a 5€ monthly budget. Since my price information was severely outdated, I decided to go back to the DYI solution.

Went through the hoops of reactivating the integration, modified the Google Cloud project to fit the new ways, changed the config according to the latest instructions and, after a couple of days of struggling, it works… kind of.

The problem is that the devices constantly oscillate between being online and offline in Google Home. And they do it so often that voice commands are barely usable at this point. Even when they work, I have the impression that triggering any state change takes longer than it used to two months ago.

The Duck DNS is set up correctly (tried both with the addon and by configuring the router), everything works perfectly from the app (while not in the local LAN, of course), even Google Home works sometimes. Infrastructure wise I haven’t change anything in my LAN (Pi’s IP is the same, port forwarding is the same).

Any ideas about what else to check are welcome!

Thanks!

If you pay annually it amounts to 5,8 Euro per month, just saying.


More like 6.25€, but that is not the point of this thread.

Probably a USD/Euro conversion thing, I got 5,8 Euro when converting from USD. Not sure why you are mentioning price being out of budget if that’s not the point of the thread, to me it seems like a small increase to pay for as you say “flawless experience” but fair enough.

I just mentioned the price in order to give a bit of context. Some of us has significant others (to be as inclusive as possible) that need to sign off on recurrent expenses. Mine was not annoyed enough by the previous free solution to be able to justify more than 5€ a month.
Problem is that now, given that things barely work anymore, she’s inclined to believe that it is all a trick to make us pay.

Did you find a solution for this? Mine is also saying “sorry, cannot reach home assistant…” in about 50% of voice commands given to Google Home.