After having problems lately with HA Bridge (not being discovered be Alexa or Google Home) & trying to setup emulated hue for Home Assistant I wondered about the likelihood (or whether it would be technically possible) to create ‘proper official’ Home Assistant skills for Alexa and Google Home?
It would be SO much easier to be able to install the skills, link your Home Assistant account and have them talk natively to Home Assistant in the same way yo can with Philips Hue, SmartThings, TP-Link plugs etc.
I think Alexa needs a cloud based service for skills (to be confirmed), that would already be a blocking point.
It seems it’s the same for home-assistant, for example during the review process, they’ll do the following:
Unhealthy: Google will regularly send a request to the endpoint of your MAIN intent, and check that we get an appropriate response. If we detect that your endpoint has gone down or is unresponsive, we will temporarily stop serving your actions to users.
And that doesn’t really work if you don’t have a central, cloud based, endpoint.
I’ve started using this, with IFTTT triggers (Google Home only at the moment), and I’m surprised how well it works.
The good thing about Google Assistant IFTTT triggers is that you don’t have to say ‘turn on’ or ‘trigger’ before the script, scene etc. you want to run/activate. You can also use multiple trigger phrases for each thing.
It won’t be as good for Alexa (in my opinion) as you always have to start by saying ‘trigger [activity name]’ which doesn’t feel natural, and you can’t use multiple different phrases. But having said that it’s not that bad.
Really hoping for this after spending probably 8 hours trying to get the emulated hue working. Still nothing. Not even sure where the issue lies as there is no way to actually see what Alexa is doing.
We could imagine some service providing the link between a Google account and an HASS instance - that would be API URL + password. This service would be the one checked by the Actions on Google service, hence would always be available online. When an user want to use this skill, he has to link its Google Home/… to its HASS instance anyway, so this kind of Google account <-> HASS instance repository is something that would be needed anyway.
I thought the alexa component was the official alexa home assistant skill. A skill that which has the home assistant invocation and intents are programmed within HA.
What I would really like is a way to remotely tell a Google Home device to mute its mic. I was hoping to see that in your link but it wasn’t there from what I saw. Do you know if this is possible?
Sitting in Bangkok airport right now, but I’ll see what can be done with the volume setting. It might be a case of read the current value and set a very low or zero value - then set it back to that value after a mute toggle.
Following on from @sparkydave’s suggestion, A way to mute the Google Home mic using HA would be amazing.
My Google Home mini’s mic is far more sensitive than my Google Home, and it always picks up commands intended for the Google Home in the living room all the way from the bathroom. I don’t want music playing in the bathroom when I’m sitting in the living room!
The lights in the bathroom are motion activated, so if muting mics was possible I could selectively control when the home mini is listening based on whether anyone’s in the bathroom. That would instantly solve my problem!
After 3 months of using Home Assistant with 0 knowledge of HA, linux, raspberry pi 3, programming, python, alexa and etc.
I really love HA which already like a half way of everything leads to Home Automation. I try to make thing as simple as possible not to break HA such as simple component that HA provided.
I didn’t use Let’s Encrypt since the beginning until last night which I found so many components I want to try and use need let’s encrypt. I really worry about renewing let’s encrypt that might be the problem in the future as it has to be every 90 days and so on.
I already have homebridge for Homekit and Cloud for Alexa which I can control my devices by voice. As I said as simple as possible. The way to install is simple for non programming like me.
After install let’s encrypt, I also have order google home which I would like to use voice to control my devices in HA. I found that people who already have let’s encrypt use google assistant component (need project, gaction and etc). Not much talking about google home which I think I might make the wrong decision buying google home.
I hope there is a simple way to integrate or be able to use google home.
Also if there can be a video to show how to google assistant in HA would be really really appreciate as I am not a native english user and found the way to use google assistant in HA is hard to understand for user like me and also if anything goes wrong I might break HA.
Why would you say that? I think you are misunderstanding how a Google Home is used. It requires Google Assistant to work. You can issue commands to Google Assistant FROM your Google Home and make things happen. You can’t do that without Google Home (although you can do it the same way on your phone via voice commands in Google Assistant). Google Home makes it FAR easier to do things than pulling out a phone and activating assistant on it.
Thank you for your reply and advice.
My intention is as simple install as cloud component(software) for alexa(hardware).
Or if there is a video to show how to for google assistant component, or if it is a must install google assistant component for me to be able to use google home.
Yes, currently I use home assistant cloud. This is really easy for noob like me.
I found a little bit harder for homebridge but only the installation part. The rest HA handle it. works great as well.
I have try to install google assistant, gaction. Struck with the action sdk, google always put me in smart home instead of action sdk. Now full limit of project although I have deleted everything. Have to email to google and wait for at least 2 business days for reply and can’t build the project again. So headache!@#!@$@.