Support expose to Google Assistant without nabu casa cloud

Currently, exposing entities to Google Assistant from the UI is only supported when using Google Assistant through subscription to Nabu Casa Cloud.

If there’s any technical hindrance to make it work with manual Google Assistant setups, I would like to know what they are, so they can be identified and solved.
But to me, it just looks like some features of HA are starting to be paywalled behind their subscription model.

I do not do it myself, but I think Google require an encrypted connection and that means setting up HTTPS with a public authenticated certificate, like Let’s Encrypt, port forwarding on the router and maybe also some dynamic DNS management.

So it should be possible, but the requirements for it to happen is just too complex to handle in a GUI wizard at the moment.

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Google Assistant works fine without nabu case cloud, it just requires some work to set it up. But given Google Assistant needs http access, I wonder how you would put all the different combinations to get a domain name, a SSL certificate, etc… in one config flow.

I think you’re misunderstanding what I’m requesting.
I have already added Google assistant integration manually. That’s no problem.

But if I want to add an entity to Google assistant and give it aliases/change aliases, I have to change config.yml and restart HA
Where if you’re using Nabu Casa, you can just go to settings on that entity and click “Assistants”, and choose to expose it here and modify aliases.

Likewise in HA settings under assistants, you can expose multiple entities to Google Assistant easily.
If you don’t have Nabu Casa Cloud, these settings will only work for the built in assistant “Assist”.

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Maybe it is because I’m running 2023.10 beta, but if I click entity → settings → assistants, I get this:
afbeelding

And I don’t have HA Cloud/Nabu Casa

Edit: I hope this does not become a target for ‘Remove from .yaml and move to GUI only’. I like the fact that my devices exposed to google assistant are listed in .yaml. I have a nice list of the (few) devices and their aliases. With over 1000 entities, it would become a hunt again what I have exposed.

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And if you enable the Expose toggle, you can only choose Assist, not Google Assistant, and there lies my issue :slight_smile:

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Never tried it

Doesn’t really matter if you tried it or not. It’s not there. They mentioned it in the release blog post that it’s only for Nabu Casa Cloud. So it’s not really a discussion whether I’m right or wrong. It’s a request to remove the paywall and bring the feature to people who aren’t subscribers

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I did not not mean to imply any of that. I just never tried to expose entities that way, so I did not know it does not work.

Is any body having issues with the Google assistant after updating to 2023.10. My devices are showing up offline frequently with my “project” not available warning with voice commands. I actually thought maybe they were making some changes to gui/wizardize this integration and that might have broken it but perhaps it’s Google or my connectivity.

I wish a local solution as good as Google assistant were possible but even though it’s top priority I haven’t found an as good hardware/software combination. Interesting that if it were possible that might actually steal some Nabu user’s.

You’re a bit off topic here, David

I suggest if you’re having issues, post in support forum

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More like a radio check… So sorry if I got off topic. Thanks for your contribution to the thread.

Also interested in this…

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Having the same issue here. I have to manually go into the config files and set things up even though there’s that toggle in each device. It caused a bit of confusion for me, initially, because I thought something might be wrong after I toggled it on and off on a few things and never saw it propagate throughout my Alexa and Google Home devices.

Considering the current solution for me is to go into the config and add expose: true or false manually for each device that isn’t covered by my default group expose settings, I can’t imagine it’d be too incredibly complicated to connect that toggle switch in a way that’d do that extra work for us.

I would love to be able to that. having a UI option to expose to google assistant would be huge. I have over 200 entities, adding and managing each manually is not an option.

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The silly thing is that the option is there. It just only works if you subscribe to Nabu Casa

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I was looking at the frontend code today and it seems fully reliant on nabu cloud. From the quick look, I think it’d need to be handled very differently

@dshokouhi any thoughts on this? OP and others raise a very legitimate issue. While this specific issue is certainly valid and makes the self managed Google assistant more cumbersome in the UI/UX, the bigger concern is broader and to ensure self managed doesn’t get 2nd class treatment over time (not that ive seen any evidence of that myself besides this instance - its purely a forward looking comment about potential slippery slopes).

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I totally agree with you. I have everything i need, access from internet through port forwarding and nginx reverse proxy with lets encrypt… i “had” no need for nabu but “have” to have because they pay walled google home. (and i found that you cannot restore a backup to a new build unless that is connected to the internet, what is going on with them?)
is there a manual way around this that someone has, maybe something old that still works around this ?

Here to vote up. I see here a risk that Nabu Casa will become a “Pay to unlock” option

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