When I ask Google to ‘turn off bedroom light’, it responds “OK, turning off two devices.” even though there’s only one. Similarly, turn on or off the projector yields similar results when I ask it to use my SwitchBots (eg turn on / off tumble dryer/ projector/ etc.) In the case of the projector, it hits the SwitchBot arm THREE times, so I’m often finding a device is switched on and then instantly off again…
It seems to have doubled up - sometimes tripled - the same device over & over.
I think it’s because there’s integrations to Samsung SmartThings [1], the original device’s app (e.g. SwitchBot) [2] and then Google’s own handling (and similar when using Alexa) [3,4] as well the Home Assistant integration via a VM on my NAS working through a ZigBee dongle (on a 2mtr extension).
Apparently I have dozens upon dozens of devices when in reality I only have a couple of dozen but most are doubled or tripled up…
Any suggestions on lowering these numbers, please?
If I do that, and I’ll use Google Home in this example, I have a choice…
Delete the original App link
Delete the Nabu Casa link
Delete any additional (e.g. SmartThings) link/s
If I do that, it appears to stop the entire thing working.
I can either have a device working exclusively in Home Assistant, exclusively in Google Home or both. If I leave both - It tells me “turning off two devices…” when there’s only one. If I delete either of the smart-home methods, it can’t be properly accessed from the one it’s been deleted from.
Sorry I missed that you were using Google Home. I have no experience at all with that.
but it seems that for either 1 or 2 it shouldn’t be a problem.
Do you have to have both apps able to access the same device?
I would think that just having the devices accessible to GH via the HA app would be sufficient and likely work the best since all of the devices are sourced from one location.
I have several devices I could probably add directly to Alexa but I only make them available via HA.
Again, I don’t use GH so I could be completely misunderstanding how it works. If so the just ignore me.
As @finity suggests I wouldn’t keep a device connected directly to both Home Assistant and Google Home however, I wonder if you actually have devices that you have managed to get into Home Assistant by way of the Google Home integration? If that is so then that is the problem and you are effectively bringing into Home Assistant all of your Google Home devices and then sharing those same devices back out to Google Home.
All of that being said, there is a way to configure which devices are shared out to Google Home from Home Assistant. You need to go to the “Home Assistant Cloud” settings screen, then to the “Google Assistant” settings section. There you should see a link for “Manage Entities” which will let you restrict which entities are pushed to Google Assistant/Home.
The only thing I can do here with GH is unlink companies rather than ‘disable’ individual entities. So I either lose everything related to one company - or have to deal with multiple copies of entities.
So I unlink Home Assistant, I lose alllllllll devices. If I unlink, say “Switchbot”, I lose all my Switchbot bulbs, motion & contact sensors, etc. If I unlink the bedroom light by company, I’m not confident I can call out to Google and ask it to turn off my bedroom light properly…
And when SmartThings gets included, some devices are tripled… Take this screen shot from Alexa… I have now ‘disabled’ a series of them. But I’m not sure how that’s gonna turn out once I start asking Alexa to turn on or off things… we’ll see
It just seems insane to me that there’s numerous copies of items, both in Alexa & Google-Home… Home Assistant itself seems to understand as does my SmartThings hub… But those two, GA and Alexa - they’re idiots. As mentioned, if I ask google/alexa to turn off the projector button - it hits it three times (on… off… on… or off… then on … then off again…)
This is because devices are not meant to be added simultaneously in multiple home automation platforms and then also linked between platforms. This is exactly why I removed all smart devices I had originally linked in Google Home directly and only have them directly integrated into Home Assistant. If unlinking other integrations in Google Home is removing them from Home Assistant then this tells me you haven’t directly integrated them in Home Assistant.
You are free to keep things as you have them but then you need to do as I said before.
You need to go to the “Home Assistant Cloud” settings screen, then to the “Google Assistant” settings section. There you should see a link for “Manage Entities” which will let you restrict which entities are pushed to Google Assistant/Home.
Not those directions are what you do in Home Assistant not the Google Home app.
Do I add only in HA and expect Google/Alexa to pick up from there? I’m a little lost as when I get new devices they need to be added via an app (or skill)… Am I supposed to allow Google/Alexa access to HA?
Yeah, so in general you really want to standardize on a single platform between Google Home/Alexa/SmartThings and even to a degree Home Assistant. You are beat served when you pick hardware that works with your chosen platform. In many cases Home Assistant can fill the gap between all of those platforms in terms of bringing all of your different hardware together.
My use of Home Assistant has been to get all of my hardware into Home Assistant directly in a way that I can hopefully control them all without internet. Then I connect Home Assistant to Google Home for the ease of the rest of my family. This does however bring sort of the same problem you have as my Google Devices can end up being duplicated but that is where I use those filters to not send the Google devices back out to Google Home.
Thanks for the help everyone… I was under the impression I added it to Google/Alexa (app/skill) then HA would pick it up from there…
It seems I had it back to front.
So if I’ve now understood, I begin by allowing HA to find devices BEFORE I add Google apps/ Alexa skills, and if HA doesn’t seem to pick up my devices, I can then use Google/Alexa instead and from there HA will pick them up that way…?
Right, Google devices will be required to be added to Google Home directly. Then integrate Google Home with HA to get those devices into HA, making sure to exclude them from going back out to Google Assistant/Home.
Thanks again, so would I be advised to remove all my devices from everywhere and just start over with HA first? Or would it be ok to just disable Alexa/GH independently within their respective ecosystem?
When I started with my smart home stuff I didn’t even have Home Assistant so everything was integrated into Google Home. Once I got Home Assistant up and running then I slowly migrated everything off of Google Home and directly into Home Assistant. It did cause a lot of changes of devices in Google Home, which my wife briefly complained about, but once I completed the move at that point devices would just go straight into Home Assistant and would then start showing up in Google Home.
One note is that I didn’t have a ton of devices initially in Google Home and didn’t have any routines setup there. I’ve also never setup any devices in Alexa as we only have some Amazon Kindles and Amazon Prime Video on our streaming devices, so also no routines or Alexa anything to worry about. I never started mixed Google & Amazon devices and just stuck with Google Home. If you have a bunch of Amazon smart devices like Echos or Fire TV then you are going to have more work to figure out how you want to deal with those.
I only mention Alexa because you indicated using Alexa. It would help to know what Alexa and Google devices you are integrating with in order to advise on handling those.
