Google Home error response to larger ZHA groups

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Hi folks. I’ve got Home Assistant OS (v5.9) running on an Intel NUC 10. Home Assistant Supervisor is version 2021.1.0. Connected to the NUC I have a Texas Instruments CC26X2R1 with Z-Stack coordinator (CC26X2R1_20201026) firmware on it. I’m running the Zigbee Home Automation integration with 62 devices and 115 entities. On the integrations page, the integration says " XDS110 (03.00.00.13) Embed with CMSIS-DAP, s/n: L1100F06 - Texas Instruments". I have the Nabu Casa cloud running and use this to connect to Google Assistant. There are 9 Google devices (home, mini and display) scattered around the house.

I’ve recently changed over from Zigbee2Mqtt to ZHA and set everything up again. For the most part I have the entities that I wish to expose to Google Assistant in groups and I expose the groups domain. This was the way I had it done in Z2M and it has worked fine for both. A handful of light groups and a temperature sensor are exposed to Google too.

An issue that I have run into recently is with the larger groups after moving to ZHA. For example, if I say “Hey Google, turn on living light” it works quickly and successfully but “Hey Google, turn on inside lights” then it will take about 6 seconds and then say “sorry, something went wrong for the inside lights”. I have noticed that turning on/off a group with 3 or less devices in it seems to work perfectly however the larger groups cause the failure response from Google. Despite Google’s apologies, the lights generally turn to the state I asked for, it is just an issue of an undesirable Google response.

After playing with this for a few days, I think the issue might be a timeout setting. Unlike Zigbee2Mqtt in some ways, ZHA is more ‘integrated’ so HA can likely see that all of the switches/lights are still being transitioned 6 seconds (or so) after the command is issued so the state is probably ‘in progress’ or something like that. Maybe it finishes switching the devices after 8 seconds but Google has timed out by then and plays the undesirable response.

What do you guys think the issue is and, more importantly, how do I fix it? I really can’t live with the response from Google as it erodes confidence in the my home automation ecosystem which I take much pride in. Thanks in advance.

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Hey,
I’m now experiencing the same issue using a bunch of Tuya lights for my garden lights.
A large group of 12 bulbs, and I get the error of “Something went wrong” from google.

Did you ever find a solution? I’m think of creating a boolean switch and turning on the group using that.

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Hi @onkytonk

I waited a week or so for a reply to my post asking for help but when no assistance came I dumped ZHA and went back to Zigbee2Mqtt which resolved the problem (and a number of other ZHA related issues too).

I kind of came to the conclusion that Z2M is less tightly integrated so when HA asks it (via MQTT) to toggle a larger number of switches, the MQTT message gets through and is acknowledged which HA relays to Google as success. If Z2M then takes time to process through a queue of Zigbee changes then that is behind the curtain as far as HA and Google are concerned.

Your Input Boolean switch idea might work assuming you only want on and off (not change color etc). Whatever abstracts ZHA from HA’s reporting back to Google will likely solve I’d guess.

Best of luck to you!