Hello all, I have a pretty cut and dry question I believe. It’s kind of odd but I think it’s because I don’t truly understand all of the tech involved with some of the services at play. The question is:
Am I better off to setup a connection from Hue To Google in the Google Home app or am I better off to set my lights up to come into google home app from the home assistant integration and don’t tie Hue to the google home app at all?
Can you all help me understand which of these is the better option? faster? more reliable? I don’t really understand all of the technologies at play and the break points/ pros/ cons of each option.
At the end of the day, does it matter? Like if hue has an outage, does that mean, I’m probably better off to propogate my light info from home assistant into google home rather than the option of hue to google home?
Thank you all for helping understand this ahead of time!
I believe doing Hue - Google should be faster, but not by much.
And it also means if Google can’t reach Home Assistant for any reason it will still work.
But I recommend you connect Home Assistant with Hue also that way Home Assistant will get any update you do in Google.
Home assistant will get the updates either way, but it depends on how fast it gets the updates from the hue bridge. I guess I’d prefer the original integration over HA to reduce the number of steps involved, which is probably faster. But it is pretty much a matter of taste. I would not do both at the same time, so if you add Hue to Google Home directly I’d exclude those entities from Home Assistant.
A reason to let Home Assistant do it all is that Home Assistant has this better control over what entities are exposed, and because it is cleaner to have one way of doing things. But you do create a single point of faillure.
@Edwin_D@Edwin_D Thank you all for your responses and I follow each of you. Just curious of everyones individual thoughts. Another question for you all is does the hue hub, when connected to home assistant run locally? But then of course any use of a voice assistant is where the cloud comes into play? Thank you all again for the conversation.
Using google voice assistant via a local hub for hue commands (if you pair hue hub to google of course!) will also be local as claimed by google - but I have never bothered to check this is true to be fair.
I’ve seen Google stating this too but I think it is somewhat of an overstatement. I do not think a Nest smart speaker can analyse voice commands locally. So that would need to be Nest Hub screen operations. And as far as I can tell, if the internet is down there’s not a lot you can do with your Nest smart speaker anyway. So maybe the local Hue api is used, but that isn’t the whole picture.