Hi, but should this also enable us to stream to an Alexa device (echo show for instance)?
I like the skill building tools for alexa, not so much the ones for google home… so as i saw alexa has opened their apis to get video from devices (even using webrtc to get 2 way communication), i was thinking to stream there, as i dont want to swap alexa for google home.
Right now you can TELL alexa to show the video from the google hello doorbel as this is already integrated in a skill readily available. What i am trying to do is to link a doorbell event to a visitor announcement in alexa.
This should be failry easy and require no video stream. However it does require you to ask alexa to show the video from the google hello as it is managed by this pre-existing skill.
The awesomeness would be if in addition of the announcement it could automatically turn on video streaming so you don’t even have to ask.
I will look into this more in the future, this was just a consideration on my particular use case
I’m not entirely sure why the Google Assistant camera trait won’t work with mjpeg streams but the cast via play_media works fine for mjpeg’s. I’ve played around with the home assistant component and hacked it a bit but was unable to send the a stream url that would play, this includes a direct port forwarded uri directly to the stream itself. My assumption is if we can cast via play_media, then you would assume their camera trait accepts the same. I notice the supported format is set for hls but can there be an added format being image/jpeg?
For now I have emulated the google assistant cameras using dialogflow. I’ve seen people use script’s as their callback for simple home assistant commands but I didn’t like the limitations behind which device and the natural language behind activating a camera stream.
Currently I can say to google assistant “Tell, home matrix to show [master bedroom camera] on [living room tv]”… this will then send the play_stream command with the source and device as variables (notice the brackets [], they are entities within dialogflow that I’ve used to match the entity id in home assistant)… I’ve also had the end conversation marked in my intent on dialog flow so this will simply end the conversation once I call the command. Using the term “Tell, home matrix” along with the command (with home matrix being my google projects’s name) will bypass the need to say “talk to home matrix” then saying the command.
The fact I have multiple display devices and sources, the AI on dialog flow can determine if i want living room or google hub etc based on different synonyms yet the value stays the same (depending on device or source) for my Intent script to handle.
This process is a bit more involved but once you play around with dialogflow and creating your own intents opens the doors to many other crafty unique features that can be controlled in a more natural language.
I’m happy to do a write up with code etc if this is of any interest…