Percentage fan only shows on/off button in Google Home so I can't set speed through Google Assistant

Configuration
1

I have a template fan that’s fully working inside Home Assistant. It shows the slider to set the speed which works great and has been working great for a few months now.

I’m now adding the Google Assistant integration to my HA config which is also working properly for my lights and switches but the percentage fan only shows an on/off button. There is no way to set the speed. Is this a known limitation of the percentage fan with Google Assistant or is there something I can do to fix this?

2

I just saw that HA 2021.7 was available and the release notes mention that the Google Assistant integration now has support for fan speed percentages and preset modes. Of course I immediately updated assuming that would fix my issue but alas, no such luck. But at least this confirms it wasn’t implemented in 2021.6 yet.

First of all thank you @jbouwh for adding support to the Google Assistant integration, but could you elaborate if there’s anything I need to do to get it working? After updating to 2021.7 my fan still shows up with just an on/off button in Google Home. For the record, I have a working template percentage fan with 3 speeds and no other features such as direction.

3

It is correct that you do not see speed or mode controls or in your app, but you can control them now with command’s like:
What is the speed of my ventilator?. (use the name of your device for ventilator)
What is the preset mode on my ventilator?
Set the speed to 10% on my ventilator.
Set preset mode to Auto on my ventilator.

Google could add more visibility to the controls in their app, but unfortunately, this is what we have for now.

4

Thank you for your quick reply and elaboration, I understand now. Google Home indeed is crippled in many more ways like that, a horrible experience when you’re somewhat familiar with the capabilities of HA. But I really just want to use Google Assistant for it’s voice control anyways.

I’ve been playing around with the voice commands but I don’t think Google Assistant (GA) is very smart at the moment, at least not in Dutch.

For example (my fan is called Ventilatie):

  • “Stel Ventilatie in op 50%” > GA does a Google search.
  • “Stel snelheid Ventilatie in op 50%” > GA does a Google search.
  • "Stel de snelheid in op 50% op mijn Ventilatie" > GA sets fan (but sometimes does a Google search?).
  • "Stel de snelheid in op slow op mijn Ventilatie" > GA often doesn’t recognize the word slow (English in a Dutch sentence), but when it does it tries to set the fan (read on why it can’t).
  • “Zet ventilator op 50%” > GA sets my fan called Ventilatie.

Just now I discover that GA seems to work better with the general word fan/ventilator than the name of my device Ventilatie, I might need to test a different name for my fan, maybe GA will get less confused then.

However, I do see some issues here:

  1. When using words (instead of a percentage) to set the speed instead my fan HA only knows the English words such as slow and high, even in a Dutch sentence.
  2. Whenever GA sets the fan speed from a word instead of percentage, the Home Assistant Logbook shows:
    “Google Assistant sent command SetFanSpeed”
    And the log shows:
    “The fan.set_speed service is deprecated, use fan.set_percentage or fan.set_preset_mode instead”
    So the fan speed isn’t actually changed.

To make things even more confusing, when I ask about the current fan speed setting GA replies in Dutch but the setting itself is in English, as a word, not a percentage:

  • “Wat is de snelheid van mijn Ventilatie?” > GA replies: “De snelheid van de Ventilatie is ingesteld op slow/high”.

I have a 3-speed fan that I converted to a percentage fan (33/67/100% speeds) and GA replies with slow for 33% and high for 67/100%.

  1. First of all: why it’s called slow and not low? It makes no sense to me to use slow/high instead of low/high. Is this an issue with GA or are these HA speed words/strings that are forwarded to GA?
  2. Why are English strings used for speed settings by GA? Is this again HA that supplies the words/strings to GA?
  3. What percentage speed settings are deemed slow and high by GA (and I assume there’s also medium)?
1 Like
5

I’m very interested in your fan template.
I’m currently struggling to make one for my mechanical ventilation, which are controlled by an API command that can send 4 commands (low, medium, high, auto).
So there’s no percentage settings of any kind.

Hoping your template can help me further. I’m also dutch, so want to utilize it with GA as well