What's the point of Google Assistant Integration?

Sorry for the naive question. I can see that I can expose devices I might not be able to sync with the google home app otherwise and thus voice control them. Is that all or is there more I am missing?

Also, for devices I can sync directly with google home, is there an advantage to syncing them through Home Assistant instead of directly through the Google Home app (ie Lutron)? For instance, with Lutron switches, would it process a voice command to turn off my lights faster if they were added to Google Home through Home Assistant rather than directly linking my Lutron account to the Google Home app?

You can also trigger scripts, create pseudo devices through use of MQTT (that you’d never be able to directly interface to Google), publishing local only IoT devices and have complete control over what you do publish to Google (you dont get that with the native integrations from the publisher).

I dont see much difference between publishing with Google and voice controlling with a Google Home then publishing with HA and controlling from Google Home.

Edit: also linking through HA means when the OEM discontinues the item, and you loose cloud access, you can keep using it through HA locally (providing the device has local control…).

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That’s one benefit, yes. However, as part of my approach to securing my network, any device that I can control locally (which is almost all devices on my network) does not have Internet access. But with the google assistant integration, I can still control all of those devices with voice commands. I see that as a pretty big benefit. Being able to run home assistant scripts with voice commands is nice too.

The answer to that is probably “it depends,” but in the case of devices that home assistant can control locally, it is nice to not rely on the servers of the manufacturer of those devices when using voice commands (like if you were to link those devices to google assistant directly instead of through home assistant). You’re still relying on Google’s servers to process the voice commands of course, but reducing reliance on another third-party server is another benefit. Of course, it’s a double-edged sword: if your server is down, voice commands won’t work for those devices.

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Yeah. My devices that have native GA integration… I use that instead of HA for the exact reason if HA is down or broken or say duckdns isn’t working (a lot lately) it doesn’t matter.

Thankfully I haven’t been burned by domain name or server downtime issues affecting voice control yet (I have my own domain name with cloudflare DNS), but admittedly I don’t use voice control a ton anyway. Plus I’d like to think my server is more reliable than third-party servers but that’s probably just me being biased or arrogant. Or both. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Thanks for the quick responses all, that is very helpful!

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Yeah I use my own domain as well with Namecheap DNS and it’s been pretty reliable as well. But a few months ago an update (I think) or something like that took my HA down and I didn’t have time to fix it but at least I could still control those lights independently with Google. They are still totally controllable in HA as well of course so all bases covered. In 2 years no downtime with my server (a NUC)…

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