Step by step instructions to use Google AIY Voice Kit with Philips Hue

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1

Hi all,
I have recently purchased a Google AIY Voice Kit which works fine when I follow the instructions provided with the magazine. I also purchased a Philips Hue A60 Starter Kit which I understood I could ‘easily’ control with Google Home. Little did I know that the verison of Google Assistant that you install on the Raspberry Pi is not the same as the Google Home and you can’t just link up Wifi with a few clicks. Nor can you just connect things like Google Music etc. so it plays music on demand. I have very very little programming experience with Python and next to no experience with Raspberry Pi’s, so the more I read into these project the more overwhelming this all seems.

So my question is can this even be done by someone like me, with no programming/networking experience? If so, could someone point me in the direction of step by step instructions for a complete novice who wants to use a Raspberry Pi 3 and a Google Voice AIY kit to control a Philips Hue light?

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You can quite easily do this in a couple of ways. Firstly, you could use a call to the hass RESTful API to do it, see https://home-assistant.io/developers/rest_api/ or you could use a more native approach to the AIY kit using Phue https://github.com/studioimaginaire/phue

See the following example for Phue:

#!/usr/bin/python

from phue import Bridge

b = Bridge('your bridge ip')

# If the app is not registered and the button is not pressed, press the button and call connect() (this only needs to be run a single time)
#b.connect()

# Get the bridge state (This returns the full dictionary that you can explore)
b.get_api()

lights = b.lights

# Print light names
for l in lights:
    print(l.name)

You can then use your named lights as something like:

 b.set_light(['kitchen light'], 'on', True)