Our Google Assistant skill is live!

![](upload://uC9e0lTPoIaOd8lGngmoxdJH4Dg.png)

Guess what? Yep, our Google Assistant Smart Home skill is live! It’s a mouthful but it means that you can now control your Home Assistant devices via any Google Assistant enabled device by simply saying things like “Ok Google, turn on the lights”.

To get started:

  • Enable Home Assistant Cloud
  • Install our skill for Google Assistant. As of this writing, the link is not live yet: you can find it by opening the Google Home app -> Home Control, tap on the blue + at the bottom right and find Hass.io in the list.
  • Optional: Tweak the devices that are getting exposed to Google Assistant.

Things to note:

  • The skill is called Hass.io, but will work with normal Home Assistant too. The name was necessary to avoid confusion between Home Assistant, Google Assistant and Google Home.
  • Works with Home Assistant 0.65 or later.
  • All message handling is done local and is open source.
  • If you have an Android device with Google Assistant, you can control your devices too.
  • Home Assistant 0.68 will introduce a button to the Cloud config panel to trigger a sync of available devices.

Home Assistant Cloud is still in open beta and free to use. Open beta period has been extended to June 1. Many thanks to Quadflight for providing the Raspberry Pis that Google used for physical testing and thanks to Arsaboo for helping with testing.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2018/04/24/launch-google-assistant-support/
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:tada: Congratz!

It is working amazingly! :heart:

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worked great, excellent work!

Is Home Assistant Cloud a hard requirement or would it work with having my HomeAssistant exposed to the Internet as well? Is this a replacement for the manual setup as described on https://www.home-assistant.io/components/google_assistant/ or is it essentially the same, just with less setup hassle because it communicates with HA Cloud?

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Great news! How does this compare to the existing component? Does it operate in the same way just easier to set up?

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@splitbrain You need to activate Home Assistant Cloud in your local instance in order to use it, yes, that is a requirement. You do not need to expose your instance to the internet, as in, you do not need to arrange for port forwardings, but still requires generic outbound internet of course.

It is a replacement for the manual steps/setup.

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Easier to setup; no more: port forwardings, ssl requirements, exposing it to the outside world, google developer accounts, ect, ect…

Some people don’t like being exposed to the outside world as well, with this method, the port forwardings are no longer needed.

Should we expect the support for the manual setup to go away in the future, or is the Home Assistant Cloud version going to exist as a premium offering alongside the (free) manual setup version?

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Thanks for clarifying frenck! :slight_smile:

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I’m not the one to decide upon this, but @balloob has made this very clear in posts and podcasts.
The Home Assistant Cloud will NOT replace anything.

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Correct. The manual way is going to stay. It’s using the exact same code as Home Assistant Cloud to execute the commands. The manual way just requires a bunch of hoops to setup the authentication and expose your Home Assistant instance to the internet. Home Assistant Cloud takes care of that.

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Thanks so much for this. I’ve already tried it, and even with close to 320 devices, it works perfectly, and the setup was a breeze!

Before I get too excited about this and head down that rabbit hole, are there any updates to the expected pricing/subscription model for Home Assistant Cloud? It is not particularly cheap just to get Google Assistant integration. This is similar to the Chamberlain MyQ integration, and they got shredded by the community for even $1/month.

Thanks for all the hard work that went into making this possible, hopefully your celebrating with a well deserved beer tonight.

Congrats, good job! :wink:

Good job :grinning: Working like a charm.

Hi, I live in Argentina and the option named smart home doesn’t appear un my Google home. Does someone knows if there is a regional limitation? How can I activate this option?

Thanks

UK here running Google Assistant on iPhone X. I have the issue as Hugo. No Smart Home. I do not have a Google Home device, although I do have the Google Assistant AIY Pi set up.

do the exposed devices go off of the previous configuration for google assistant or based on the ones configured for alexa? I ask because with google assistant as before i had 13 devices exposed, which is how it was intended, now i’m seeing 103

Swapped over from manual method to cloud one, easy as. well done team