Google Home integration and emulating Things

Third party integrations
1

I am new to home automation but keen to get deeper into the details.

Context: The totality of my home installation is several Google Home speakers and a pair of Sonoff Basic one channel wifi switches connected to lamps. The link between Google Home and the switches is via IFTTT. I have defined some phrases in IFTTT to turn the lights on/off.

Complication: It works ok but because, I assume, IFTTT doesn’t present devices natively to Google Home, my phrase has to be, shall we say, a little cryptic. If I try to use something like “Turn on the front room light”, the Google Home speaker responds with “It doesn’t look like that device is connected”.

Question: Can I use Home Assistant to present an arbitrary device natively to Google Home such that if i ask ‘turn on the lights in the front room’ I have complete control of that action that is taken?**

I haven’t done anything clever with the switches (eg, installing tasmota), but I have worked out how to trigger them via curl (using ifttt webhooks). It isn’t a particularly elegant solution but I figure if I can pursade Google Home think I have a light (or whatever) and to run a command (curl) when asked, I can pretty much do anything.

I’d really appreciate any advice.

Thanks,
STDOUbT

2

The answer to your question is yes. There is also an eWelink integration that someone recently made as well but the best way is to flash Tasmota.

3

I use the eWelink integration and it works fairly well.
Before using that, I simply named the switches as “kitchen light” and “living room light” in eWelink application, linked my google assistant account with eWelink, and I could tell to turn on the kitchen light viua voice command without using IFTTT.

4

Yeah that’s correct. EWeLink is directly supported by Google Home.

5

I didn’t realise EWeLink worked natively with Google Home! I must have missed it when I first looked and then just assumed IFTTT was the only way! Got it set up now and it does what I originally wanted, but now I have a taste of Home Assistant…