Zigbee, Home Assistant and Google Home

Hardware
1

Seeing as my WiFi is filling quickly with smart devices I am starting to use Zigbee. I’m a bit of a noob at all this but in a past life was a techie so you can be a bit rough with me :slight_smile:

I am trying to achieve a network of mixed WiFi and Zigbee devices from different manufacturers, all on the Home Assistant (on a Pi) but controllable by voice through Google Assistant - and ideally each with it’s own manufacturer app for Android (but the HA app would do). The voice control is the critical bit. And it needs to be reasonably easy to set up and maintain. :slight_smile:

The WiFi side is fine but I am struggling to find a Zigbee bridge/hub which can do that for me. Or maybe it’s just the way I am configuring it.

I have now got a Sonoff ZBBridge flashed with Tasmota, a Sonoff Zigbee 2 Dongle Plus, and I just bought a Conbee II. They all run under ZHA on the HA and I have had stuff working with them all - but I don’t see how I can make them work in Google Home.

Am I just being incredibly stupid or is there no way to do it? Or should I be approaching it from a different angle? I do not want to be tied to one manufacturer (which, I think, rules out the SmartThings hub)

Thanks for reading - any advice will be gratefully received.

2

If you connect Google Home with Nabu casa (or HA manually) then sync devices in Google app all entities that you expose will be visible in Google Home.

1 Like
3

If you are able to integrate all devices into home assistant, you can integrate home assistant with google home and all your home assistant devices will be available over smart speaker.

So, from google integration perspective, it doesn’t matter if it is zigbee or wifi, it’s home assistant’s responsibility to execute the incoming command.

To integrate home assistant into google home, you have two options; 1/ use nabu casa and it is instantly ready 2/ take the challenge of DIY and go through steps to integrate it manually

4

Aha! I did start looking at that yesterday then got side-tracked.

I think the DIY route would be too complex.

I’ll have a look at Nabu Case, thank you both.

5

These might help, just in case you want to go DIY route… ?

6

Thanks for those @k8gg, much appreciated.

I think long term I will go with the Nabu Casa - I’ll be signing up for 31 day trial this week - but the second link includes a further link to a page called How to integrate Google Assistant with Home Assistant without a subscription at How to integrate Google Assistant with Home Assistant without a subscription | JuanMTech which I may well have a go at alongside.

I have to keep the whole automation thing reasonably easy and not impactful in many ways, as if for any reason I were not around for a while to keep it going and support it I don’t want the house to stop working! But I do enjoy a challenge…

Once again, thanks all

7

There is no need for that if you have Nabu Casa.

8

Thanks, that’s how I understood it but I like tinkering so I’ll try that one first as it looked well documented.

I am sure I’ll end up with Nabu Casa though so I am making a backup of my SD card to tinker with, then can revert when I am ready to try Nabu Casa.

9

Most of the time, setting of Alexa and Google integrations are setup once and will work without any further issues. On the other hand, subscribing to nabucasa will support HA team.

10

I have nabucasa and the only way I was able to make it work was:

  • creating a script on HA for each state
  • create an automation on Google home that runs a “scene”

That’s because all scripts are shared as scenes on Google home.

I am not been able to “see all devices home HA” automatically and act on them and it’s a bit cumbersome, create a script to turn on, another to turn of, then the automation with xxxx words to enable it…

Does anyone made it work in a different way?

11

I just found that my issue was that I was not exposing devices, check this docs Google Assistant configuration