Here Comes Google Home!

[tpchristian]

Nice job! I'll try this out tomorrow.

[tpchristian]

Hey, I got this working today via the IFTTT 3P plugin. It is seeming a bit slow to me. About 7 seconds after get the conformation from home does it event show up in the logs.

[baudi]

Yeah, same here. I'm looking at a different way of doing it. I have a couple of always-on old android phones/tablets in my house that I use as weather stations, alarm clocks, web cams, and so on. I'm planning to use the Join or Autoremote IFTTT techniques to send a message to one of them and have Tasker do an HTTP Get of the JSON call to my HS machine.

Haven't done it end-to-end yet, but I've proved the principle, and it's much, much faster.

What we really need is a Google Cloud Messaging plugin for HS that doesn't depend on a one-man-show programmer in Brazil, brilliant as he is. I've been burned a couple of times by single-developer software that the developer gets tired of supporting or whatever. Google would never do such a thing (cough, google reader, cough, google fiber, cough).

This may all become moot after Google releases the assistant API next month, but that's not clear yet.

[Brady]

Is there any reason not to simply use the native HomeSeer IFTTT actions? Just don't want the dependency on myhomeseer?

Creating a Google Assistant trigger on any phrase you want and having it turn on/off a device works perfect for me. There is a slight delay yes, but maybe 2 seconds max.

I went with the native Hue integration for many lights, then I just used IFTTT actions to fill in a few gaps until the developer API is available.

I actually purchased both an Amazon Dot & Google Home this week... not sure which direction I want to go in. Looking to place them throughout the house. I really like that the devices and Google Home itself are tied to specific rooms. For example saying "turn off the lights in this room" will only target the room where that specific google home is. It is possible to control groups with the Dot as well, but I'm digging the Google approach more.

Only other callout.... waking the devices.... Alexa >>>>>>>>>>> OK Google or Hey Google. Yes I don't like interacting with a brand name, but also Alexa is just easier to say.

[baudi]

What we've been trying to do is pass a voice command to HS. Something like "homeseer turn on the living room lights" where "turn on the living room lights" gets passed through to Homeseer's voice command processor. There's no way to do that with the IFTTT Homeseer service.

[Brady]

What we've been trying to do is pass a voice command to HS. Something like "homeseer turn on the living room lights" where "turn on the living room lights" gets passed through to Homeseer's voice command processor. There's no way to do that with the IFTTT Homeseer service.

Looks like I need to do some studying, I'm not all that familiar with Homeseer's native voice command processor. :-)

[baudi]

Start reading this thread at post #55. It'll explain some of it.

[tpchristian]

Looks like I need to do some studying, I'm not all that familiar with Homeseer's native voice command processor. :-)

What we are trying to do is pass it through to the HS voice processing so that you don't have to setup 100 commands in IFTTT to handle the lights. I have roughly 50 lights in my house and would need a command for on/off and that doesn't even include diming. What would help is if HS created a HS IFTTT command to process voice text. Might be the same delay -- Might be slightly better.

If you are trying Alexa, you have other options. There is a HS skill as well as a HS light control API that you can setup. BTW, much more advanced, but you can create a custom skill so that you can use your own name instead of saying "tell HomeSeer". (I prefer tell the house) Homeseer went down the same route as google in thinking that we want to say the name of the company when we are talking to our house.

We are only going down this route because Home just came out. They don't have other more advanced ways of handling this quite yet, but do have a pretty flexable way of using IFTTT as a short-term way of getting this done.

[Brady]

What would help is if HS created a HS IFTTT command to process voice text.

This would open a world of possibilities. Could be very cool since the Google Assistant trigger already allows you to pass text and a number in the custom triggers.

I'll start taking a look earlier in this thread. Thanks all!

[baudi]

What I'm hoping is that the developer api makes it easy (or at least possible) to write a HS plugin that bypasses IFTTT altogether. The plugin would wait for incoming Google Assistant messages and trigger events based on those messages.

[TechHA]

This works. I think we've got a successful Homeseer/Google Home interface.

Can you do a how to for dummies? Start to finish. Would love to give this a try.

Thanks

[tpchristian]

While not specifically on IFTTT, I wrote a guide for Home and IFTTT. Hopefully, this with a few of the posts above from baudi will help to get you going. Let me know if you have questions. One thing to keep in mind when entering the URL is that you may need to add a port to the server name if you having it running on something other than the default 80. You'll also need spuds plugin at this time. When you go to setup for that, you'll enter your authorization for dropbox.

Create an IFTTT applet for Google Home

[Tim.Kieschnick]

Preferences

I would be interested in your reasoning for this preference. Is this a trust issue (Google/Amazon) or on technical merit?

Whilst I have only seen the demo videos for Google Home, I would prefer to say 'Alexa' than 'OK Google' to initiate an action.

I have a lot of Google devices (Android/Chromecast/SHIELD) and preferences and integration with Chromecast is key for playing media.

"Okay Google, play KYGO on Shared Chromecast"

I _believe_ Google's voice recognition is better than Amazon because of the context it holds.


FYI, I have IP2IR as well as BLDenon configured for each TV in my home with a GEFEN 8x8 HDMI matrix switch which lets me simulcast any source to any TV.

[alphatech]

This sounds very interesting, can you please elaborate a little bit more on what you do with the GEFED and simulcast?

I have Google home as well, I real like it, I think can do more than echo and it has a huge library of searches. I like the fact that you do not need to repeat the same world again on the same search. You can say how far is the moon and then how big it is without repeating the phase moon. I do not like the sound of it, I think echo is better. I hope they integrate it soon with HS and without saying tell homeseer to tell google home to tell homeseer to turn the light, I have a short memory span :-)

I have a lot of Google devices (Android/Chromecast/SHIELD) and preferences and integration with Chromecast is key for playing media.

"Okay Google, play KYGO on Shared Chromecast"

I _believe_ Google's voice recognition is better than Amazon because of the context it holds.


FYI, I have IP2IR as well as BLDenon configured for each TV in my home with a GEFEN 8x8 HDMI matrix switch which lets me simulcast any source to any TV.

[tpchristian]

Aldo,

I would encourage you to take a glance at the Google Home IFTTT triggers. They are very powerful. You can create phrases that will not involve "tell HomeSeer". I think that this is, at least, a great stop-gap until there is work done with the official API. I do have one setup in a "tell the house..." style. I use that as a catch-all to send any valid HS speech to HS. Other than something like that, you can make it pretty natural and similar to what it would be with pre-integrated partners with Echo or Home.

-Tom