I’m currently heavily dependent on IFTTT to integrate Google Home with Home Assistant. Now that IFTTT wants to charge US$10 per month for any more than 3 applets, I’m in big trouble with 64. For example "turn pinhole off for 10 minutes”, “I’m going to bed” and “leave the lights on until $ gets home” are going to be a challenge to replace.
Are others in the same boat, and what plans have you got?
Integrate Google Assistant with Home Assistant, create scripts in home assistant that do what you want, expose those scripts to Google Assistant, and create custom routines in the Google Home app to run those scripts via your voice commands: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/google_assistant/
I’m worried that’s the only option. It looks like a pain to set up. And can it handle variables in the voice command? Also I understand you have to say “hey google turn on (script name)”, which is unnatural.
I’ll give the Google Assistant integration a go. But a large chunk of my routines have a variable in the command, and as far as I can see, this capability is only available with IFTTT. I’m not really keen on yet another monthly subscription, even if it is currently only $2 - they want it to be $10, so it will probably go up over time.
You only have until October 7th to get this pricing, they’re referring to it as a “special introductory offer.” And it will only be valid for one year, after that it will raise to the standard $10 / month rate.
I was interested in alternatives to IFTTT, and the only one proposed was the Google Assistant integration. I had tried ages ago but it was way too complex. However, the current incarnation was relatively painless, once you work out you have to do some things in a different order. I already had duckdns/nginx setup.
I have converted most IFTTT routines over to the integration, and this is what I have discovered:
Google understands less. IFTTT routines seem to be understood more reliably than Assistant routines, which is just strange.
IFTTT has variables, whereas Assistant does not. Therefore you cannot say “Turn the lights off in x minutes”. I’m currently using this, for example, to turn pihole off for a while. I guess I can cope with it always being a fixed time period.
By default the integration exposes everything compatible to Google Assistant. I turned this off and manually exposed each. It might have been better to leave it on and manually un-expose (assuming that works).
I have different routines for going to bed vs going to sleep. I created an input_select called “bed status” to handle the different cases, and then set the Assistant routine to “Set bed status mode to Sleeping” (for example). That then triggers lights turning off, etc.
I was exposing deCONZ entities to Google using HomeBridge and the GSH plugin. With this I had problems with room allocation in Assistant. The integration seems to be a much better choice for this.
The Google Assistant app on iPhone (6s) seems a bit dodgy at times. You can get into situations where there’s no back button, so you have to kill it and relaunch. This makes the creation of GA routines more tedious.
The Google Home will give you the same “sorry I don’t understand” if it doesn’t understand what you’re saying, or what one of the steps in the routine is telling it to do.
Google Home has an activity history, but when it doesn’t understand you, it doesn’t add much value there.
I used ifttt several years ago when there were few other ways to integrate things like we can now. I’ve written custom scripts and used other’s scripts and apps to do everything ifttt was doing. Only difference is, my scripts are much quicker and more reliable.
When I got the “pay us or else” e-mail, I immediately deleted both my accounts.
Don’t make the mistake I did! I disconnected IFTTT routines and then archived them. However, for some, I did not disconnect first. This leaves them behind, so if you say the phrase to Google Home, it will give you the IFTTT response, but not do any action.
If you recreate them in IFTTT and then disconnect, it seems to clear Google in most cases. However, if you have alternative ways of saying it in IFTTT, they don’t seem to clear even if you recreated that part too.
Creating a new IFTTT routine with that phrase will cause it to take over, but then disconnecting will cause Google to go back to the original. I’ve tried removing Google’s permissions to IFTTT and vice versa, and resetting the Google Home to factory settings, but neither worked. Hopefully it will tidy itself up in a few days. Until then, I can’t turn the heater on.