I have read a heap of posts regarding the setup of emulated hue and I don’t know if I have lost track somewhere or what but I was hoping someone can provide a bit of guidance.
My objective is to use my Google Home to provide voice activated control of everything I have setup in Home Assistant. I thought that by setting up emulated hue I would be on the right track, but then got confused between it and HA bridge… do I need both? what is the setup flow of all this to get voice activated control of Home Assistant via my Google Home? Do I need to create each item from Home Assistant within the Google Home app on my phone to link them all together? I tried by installing HA bridge and adding 1 light, but then the Google Home app on my phone started showing 2 lights of the same name…neither of them actually worked when I tried to control the light
Restart HA and make sure you can hit in your browser
http://<HA IP Address>/description.xml
http://<HA IP Address>/api/pi/lights
and that you can see all the ‘switches’ that you enabled in customize.
Then open the Home app, add Philips Hue and it will load in all your entities. You dont need to add rooms nor rename anything in the app. Then use the name you used in customize for control, i.e.
This is true for any new setups using Google Home app (on android or ios) + Google Home
Trying to add “Philips Hue” as a Home automation device in Google Home app will result in you being redirected to Philips Hue login page (see the above mentioned thread)
Local discovery of Hue hubs has been disabled in the app
I really hope someone can fix emulated_hue or come up with an alternative. Siri works perfectly with homebridge but really want Google assistant (on phone and Home)
Unless I’m getting things mixed up again, I thought I read that you can use an old APK of the Google Home app to do the initial pairing of the physical Google Home and Home Assistant. That’s what I did to get to where I am now. As far as I can see it worked, but I’ll need to wait until I get back home next week to make the other changes required that I had missed in the Home Assistant config
However I am using Google Home app on iOS. Been trying to spin up an Android VM and then use an older version of apk, but having issues with getting the VM up and running.
@hp-sn Im not sure I agree that this doesn’t work. Im in Australia, and have recently purchased a Google Home. I am running the latest Home app and I have done the above twice now and it worked no problems. This was not possible trying to use the Google Assistant on phone only but works fine with the Home. Ive never had a physical hue device.
Edit: I am using Android s7, so it looks like iOS app could be the problem
Since my ISP does not let me do port forwarding I went with Tor Oninon Configuration (https://home-assistant.io/docs/ecosystem/tor/1). Since this in reality has end to end encryption do I need to a SSL Certificate in order to have this work with google home?
@Norik_Krasniqi The two primary requirements for the Google Assistant component is that your Home Assistant is available publicly over the internet. This is because Google will make calls to Home Assistant API to fulfil what you have requested from the assistant.
The API (HTTP port) needs to be available over SSL with a certificate that is signed by a Trusted public CA. If you dont want to buy a SSL cert, or if you have a dynamic IP, you could look at Duck DNS.
There is a lot of information in the following thread:
@hp-sn I already know about this one but the issue is that my ISP limits me because they let port forwarding only for commercial customers while not for residential. I have tried to forward the port 8123 but when I try to access from outside http://publicIP:8123, I have no access.
Since at this time with this ISP this is not an option, do you think there is any other way?
@Tinkerer I did and it’s working but now I want to integrate Google Home but Google Home requires SSL. Can i add SSL to Tor? If yes, any advise how to do that?
@Norik_Krasniqi The primary issue for you is not if you have the communication between Google Cloud and your HASS encrypted or not. The issue is that your HASS needs to be publicly available for Google Cloud to make API calls.
ToR endpoints cannot be routed to by Google Cloud (This is where your app will run).
So if your ISP does not allow any incoming traffic (on any port) then you do not have any options. I would suggest to change to another ISP, or check if the ISP will allow incoming traffic on ANY port. It doesnt need to be TCP/8123. It can be anything.
Once you have solved that, then you can look at encrypting the communication with SSL using DuckDNS or a “real” certificate.