Home IP Address Making Requests to External HA Domain

Configuration
1

While trying to debug why I’m getting a websockets API error when trying to cast my dashboard to one of my Google Home Hubs, I realized that my external Home Assistant domain is receiving hundreds of requests from my home IP address.

In the Home Assistant settings, I have the following configured:

  • “Configure what website addresses Home Assistant should share with other devices when they need to fetch data from Home Assistant” → https://{my-external-ha-domain}

  • " Local network" → http://homeassistant.local:8123

Is it normal to be seeing such high volume of requests being made from within your home network to the external domain? Also, I have a Cloudflare WAF that blocks any requests that are not coming from Google IP addresses or that do not have a valid mTLS certificate. Could that be causing problems that I’m unaware of?

2

Hi

Talking to the Google speakers in any way, casting, TTS, Music, etc always involves the cloud.

3

Thanks for the response!

Just to confirm, you’re saying that when I attempt to send a TTS message, my Home Assistant install reaches out to my Google Home Hub (locally), but then the Google Home Hub attempts to reach my Home Assistant externally (via its public domain)?

4

As I understand it, I may be mistaken, but I think this is close…
You fire a TTS command to Google-Translate (the default) or to one of the other TTS services, it has to convert the text to an audio file, so that goes to the cloud or to whatever engine you have installed (maybe whisper) to be converted. That audio file comes back, then is sent to the google cloud and that sends it to the google speaker.
for these files to get back home to you, the external_url stuff needs a path to get into your HA server from the outside with a valid cert (NOT self-signed).