Use Assist with Google Home Devices?

Configuration Voice Assistant
1

Hi,

there’s a way to use brand new “Assist” with google home devices like google home minis?

Maybe a routine that calls a script?

Thanks in advance

2

Indirectly, yes

3

Are you sure?

Looking at the docs I read:

If you want to use Google Assistant (for example, from your phone or Google Home device) to interact with your Home Assistant managed devices, then you want the Google Assistant integration.

4

That’s not what you want, right?
You want HA to interact with your GA devices, or so I understood.

5

No sorry my bad. I want to use Assist (voice assistant built in HA) instead of Google Assistant to interact with my home.

I can do it via iPhone using official shortcut provided by HA developers and I was wondering if my wife that has an android can do the same.

6

It’s still not clear to me what you want. If you want to issue Assist commands on your Google Assistant devices, such as a Google Home Mini, that’s not possible. Maybe it could be possible with the Conversational Actions but those are deprecated and will stop working in a couple of months. Not sure why you want to use Assist though. You can use the Google Assistant integration to expose your home assistant devices to Google Assistant and then you will be able to control them by taking to Google Assistant.

7

If you want to issue Assist commands on your Google Assistant devices, such as a Google Home Mini, that’s not possible

yes that was my goal. Reason? 1) avoid expose everything to google cloud service 2) use advanced Assist commands. For example in my native language I cant’ ask “how many lights are on” to google assistant but I can do it to Assist.

8

Did you ever find a solution?

9

no. I found some discussion but nothing more

10
11

I’ve done this, but using the ESPHome config from here.

Some things to note are the minimum order size from PCBWay (at least for these PCBs) is 5 units.

Next thing is, you need to be comfortable cracking open the Nest Mini 2 in order to replace the PCB. There is an instructional video at the gist I linked above, and it requires no soldering, just steady hands.

A couple of things I have noticed since using it:

  • The sound quality is not comparable to what it was when it had Google’s PCB
  • You can either use the wake word detection, or have it play as a media_player in HA, but it cannot do both at the same time. So you can’t have it playing music and then ask it to do something with a wake-word.
  • Wakeword detection is flaky - several false activations (however I have only tested alexa so YMMV)
  • Sometimes there is a 15 second pause after I speak a command, but most of the time the response is immediate (my pipeline is openwakeword on HA, whisper running on a separate server with a GPU for faster inference speeds)
  • I’ve noticed it randomly becomes unavailable sometimes for up to 15 minutes during which I can’t use it. Eventually it becomes available on it’s own, but it does not disconnect from my wifi since I can still ping it.

The first two might be fixed later, I don’t really know as this is my first foray into ESPHome so I don’t know it’s capabilities or limitations too well. The last point may just be how my network is setup (HA and the device are on different VLANs, I’ve just changed the ESPHome setting to use ping instead of mDNS so that might fix things).

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12

Following the 15 second pause issue here: Home Assistant cloud STT latency
and here:
Poor end of speech detection · Issue #20 · rhasspy/wyoming-satellite · GitHub