Google Home Support

Feature Requests
1

Are there any plans to support Google Home like the Amazon Echo ?

2

This is done - just a matter of waiting till the next update (or installing manually).

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/pull/4708

As I understand it, this update will let your emulated_hue work with EITHER Alexa or Home due to the way Home expects device IDs (and a desire not to break existing Alexa implementations).

3

It is already in the newest version

4

Curious to know if anyone is investigating how the new Google Actions (announced today: https://developers.google.com/actions/) can be integrated with HA to achieve a more generic support for Google Home (not just particular devices)? I’ll be looking at it anyway, was curious if anyone else was too :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

Looks promising! I think this also creates the ability to use Google Home to speak custom messages back to you

6

So just quick update on this, I banged together a quick interface and it works pretty awesome, being able to ask home assistant for various data points in your house via natural language ended up working quite nice.

The only caveat though (and this is a big one) is that it looks like Google intend all new chat bots to be publicly accessible, you cannot make the hook point from the Google Actions API private, meaning eventually everyone would have access to it.

While in development it’s private (linked to your gmail account), and it needs to go through an approval process. Once approved, theoretically anyone could say the trigger phrase and have access to my hass implementation (not ideal to say the least :wink: ). One way around it would be to identify the user talking (via the linked gmail account), and use that in some way, but they do not seem to have a way of tracking identity, so no luck there.

Hopefully they eventually move towards having private implementations. It’s still very early in development so here’s hoping.

As a side note there’s also a comment about looking out for the “Embedded Google Assistant SDK”, which would allow you to deploy assistant on, for instance, a Raspberry Pi, however that isn’t released yet.

1 Like
7

Nice! I guessed you looked at the obvious and keeping it in development and never submit for approval? I guess that is not an option?

Do you think it is something a HASS component can be build around?

8

Unfortunately it’s automatically submitted for approval when you add it (from what I can tell), but it seems to be taking long so while it’s in this unapproved state I’ll experiment more.

As for the HASS component, I’m not sure. Given this is just another interface to your data, I think the catch phrase is “Conversational UI”, it’s more like a replacement/alternative for the web interface, which is not really a “component”, is it?

Definitely early stages on this though, more thinking and digging, and possibly waiting for features. Would be awesome to just configure this up and have it running.

I’ll keep experimenting and see what I come up with…

1 Like
9

It appears you can manage identity using account linking: https://developers.google.com/actions/develop/identity/account-linking . Possibly a way to limit access to back end services to certain accounts.

10

I believe what you would need is some sort of cloud connected interface to be a passthrough for google home.

IE

Log into/Create account in Home Assistant Cloud API Service (Not sure if this exists) with your google account.
Setup Home Assistant Cloud API to pass requests to your HA instance.
Using that same account with the CloudAPI link it to the Google Home Home Assistant app.
Google home will then pass the authenticated requests to the Cloud Service which will relay them to your personal instance.

11

That was exactly the idea I was pondering, unfortunately (as predicted) my original implementation was rejected, for various reasons but this one sticks the most:

“Agents that facilitate or enable the automation of smart-home devices, including lighting, thermostats, locks, smoke alarms, or security monitoring devices are not allowed.”

So that sucks big time, and pretty stupid frankly, shutting out a large community of developers. Hopefully this will change eventually and they open up the connectivity to the home device. Otherwise I’m back to my original plan to use a raspberry pi with Alexa on it.

1 Like
12

what!!!???

Fxxx that. COncentrate on Alexa then

2 Likes
13

I think this is because GH is looking to have more direct home support. I believe it would more likely integrate with individual components rather than an existing automation service. I would assume due to competition :slight_smile:

14

I think it was rejected because Google is going to have so called Direct action. The main purpose is exactly to interact with Iot and home gadgets also.

15

but maybe trick the GH, like an emulated_hue style?

16

AutoVoice on Android just released integration with Home and it goes it to your Google account. Could HA go that route?

1 Like
17

Is this really the status for Google home now?
OK. Tts seems to work TTS on Google Home - plays chime but does not speak

18

No it still works it is just a setup problem. I had this issue until I fixed a setting on my side. I posted there to try and help.

19

Correct me if I am wrong, this might be a possible workaround:

Cant we use the shellscript or something like this (https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/intents) to fire off an intent that would trigger the google home intent for the native google home to start up?
eg, use the microphone button conversation: when pressed to pop open the google assistant ( as setup from addons/google_assistant/README.md at master · home-assistant/addons · GitHub)

all we need to do is pop open com.google.android.apps.gsa.staticplugins.opa.hq.OpaHqActivity and let Google handle the voice commands to automation scripts we write in HASS

Other possible triggers if you have your raspberry pi connected to a bluetooth speaker (eg. JBL pulse, charge, etc which have voice assistant built in when using the JBL connect app switches the play/pause button to fire google home intent )

That might just not make sense right now, but this is what I was thinking:

Use either the HASS app microphone button to trigger the google assistant on your phone and get it to run your automations or you can use your bluetooth speaker to tell google assistant to do stuff that is linked to your HASS automations

20

I believe you are talking about integrating with Google Assistant on android devices, this thread is specifically about the Google Home device.

As per using external microphones I would re-iterate that I think we all would like to have native Google Home device support.