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xoseperez / espurna

Home automation firmware for ESP8266-based devices
http://tinkerman.cat
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Google Home support #846

Open hyteoo opened 6 years ago

hyteoo commented 6 years ago

With Google Home getting more and more traction, what would it take to also add support for that alongside Alexa?

ColinShorts commented 6 years ago

Quite a bit of work. Alexa support isn't really Alexa support but an emulation of Phillips hue Belkin wemo local discovery and control (using fauxmoESP). Google home needs to connect to an online service to control or interact with devices. If that is something that you need then you might want to look at using openHAB or similar as it would be easy enough to setup in a few hours, or a day or so by the time you read through the docs 😀

hyteoo commented 6 years ago

Thanks for the quick answer I'm currently testing away integrating it for voice commands, however it's currently a GoogleHome - IFTTT - NodeRed connection which is not ideal at all. Command processing is done in NodeRed so not really taking advantage of G. Assistant's contextual knowledge. If Google Home would know what devices & where they are, it obviously be much integrated. I know it would be a lot of work, maybe even needs a partnership with Google for that (as they do with all other devices). However I am just thinking that if they support MagicHome, then maybe Espurna would not be out of the question. Maybe sometime in the future....who knows :)

Until then, keep up the great work!

xoseperez commented 6 years ago

There are no plans to support Google Home "natively". Current approach is, like you said, to use 3rd party services. I have the same set up you mention at home (IFTTT - Webhooks - NodeRED) and actually I wrote about it here: http://tinkerman.cat/using-google-assistant-control-your-esp8266-devices/

ColinShorts commented 6 years ago

earlier I said Phillips hue, but it is actually FauxmoESP that is used, sorry for any confusion... I was confusing myself with the phillips emulation that is available in openHAB.

Anyways, you probably guessed, but I use openHAB with the cloud connector in order to get google assistant working, it's not perfect by any means - it only currently handles switches, lights and to a lesser degree, thermostat devices. It's still quite early days, so I'm hoping it will improve in the coming months.

Unlike IFTTT, the google assistant openHAB cloud connector integration uses the openHAB api's to pull back all devices rather than those "exposed" through the cloud connector. What I am trying to get at is that there needs to be some infrastructure in place for google assistant to integrate, so it is considerably more work than adding a library or two. I've never gotten around to really trying the NodeRED route, but I found IFTTT to be a bit on the fiddly side for my liking.

If you've already got the devices setup with MQTT, adding openHAB to the mix would be fairly trivial and a pretty simple way of controlling basic devices via google assistant and/or Alexa if you so choose. You can still keep all of the back-end flows in NodeRED and/or IFTTT.

hyteoo commented 6 years ago

I tried both OpenHab and Hass, however as much as I wanted to like them, they just are not there yet. Lots of quirks, if it's not V2 it's only v1, ...etc. UI - one of the most important topics in a home automation dashboard is awful. Bringing devices together (especially devs running the same firmware) should be much simpler that that.

In nodered you can do almost anything related to the interface, works great on mobile and scales well. Also it's easy to process webrequests from the outside.

IFTTT is a temp workaround, it's too limited to really do anything. Biggest problem is when you have 2-3 G Home in different rooms and you want to "turn on the lights". There is no source information.

@xoseperez Regarding your suggestion, I know that wiki wery well. Biggest issue there is that it works ok..ish for 1 device... I have around 18 espurna switches, sensors, custom boards currently all tied together with MQTT. Exposing each one to the WAN would be a logistical nightmare (each device requiring setup in Espurna, router/firewall, IFTTT).

One other option I am exploring is Google Actions that could provide more integration..

Nephiel commented 6 years ago

How about this? https://github.com/i8beef/HomeAutio.Mqtt.GoogleHome

ColinShorts commented 6 years ago

I can't see why that wouldn't work, but it's way outside the scope of Espurna. If hazard a guess that developers would manage just fine, but it's a long way from flashing the firmware to, "hey Google, sync my devices". Remember that Alexa uses local discovery for some devices, but Google uses web connections for everything (afaik).

Have you tried this yet, it could be suitable for quite a few people here.

Nephiel commented 6 years ago

Not yet, but I intend to. I'm already too deep into the Google ecosystem to back out. I'd rather not have every lamp in the house talking to third party cloud providers on top of that, if I can build and host my own service using open source.

Nephiel commented 6 years ago

I've been testing, and found it requires adding some MQTT "glue". I'm using Node-RED:

Still trying to figure out how to get the Report State feature working.

hyteoo commented 6 years ago

@Nephiel HomeAutio.Mqtt.GoogleHome seems to be the better solution. I would also try that when I have some time, as I also want to keep all devices closed in a LAN, only talking MQTT to eachother. Pls keep us up to date on your progress

Nephiel commented 6 years ago

I tried the Report State feature. It's supposed to reduce network traffic by storing the state of each device in HomeGraph, but each device must update it every time anything changes, to keep it up to date. Still needs work, and didn't really see any improvements during the short time I had it working. Ended up just leaving willReportState set to false.

Now, as a result of the tests, I have multiple duplicate devices in Google Home that I seem unable to remove, even after unlinking. But that's an issue with the Google Home app.

TMaYaD commented 5 years ago

With google releasing new a Local home SDK it might be a good time to revisit this?

mcspr commented 5 years ago

According to https://developers.google.com/actions/smarthome/concepts/local

The local execution app contains the business logic to process the intents sent by the Local Home platform and access your smart device via the local area network. No modification of your hardware is expected to integrate local execution. ... In production, Google hosts your app in a secure JavaScript sandbox environment on the user’s Google Home speaker or Nest display. ...

I am under the impression that it needs some controller app first, which will both discover devices and dispatch network request to trigger actions (for example, using REST api calls)

TMaYaD commented 5 years ago

Yeah. On further reading through the local home SDK, it seems like this needs to be a separate companion app that runs on google home and connects to espurna.