My partner and I are very interested in Google Home integration with the Vera (specifically the Vera Edge). I have said to her that I am resistant to Amazon Echo integration (don’t like their business model). Has anyone managed to integrate Google Home with the Vera Edge (with or without 3rd part apps,… please specify)?
I’m not fond of Amazon either but I really, really don’t like Google’s. Since Vera made a skill for Echo now I guess I’m going with Alexa. Looks like someone may have to make a plugin or a bridge similar to the Echo one for Google home to integrate properly with Vera.
You can already use the ha bridge for Google home. IT’S ON THEIR PAGE that it works with Google home as well as alexa. I have not ventured that way I cannot confirm.
Thanks,… I’ll look into the HA Bridge…
Can confirm I got this to work today.
Downloaded HA Bridge, figured out getting it set up, and it pretty easily integrated with Home.
Some weirdness with doubling up on devices, but a remove and reinstall in Home fixed that. It also doesn’t seem to remove deleted devices, so be careful which of your devices you choose to add to the bridge.
Also, scenes which are part of a particular room are fired when you say “turn off all the basement lights” so if you also have a scene assigned to the room “basement” which turns ON some lights it will fire and those lights will turn on.
Once you figure all that out though, it works like a charm.
[quote=“jaccord, post:5, topic:194444”]Can confirm I got this to work today.
Downloaded HA Bridge, figured out getting it set up, and it pretty easily integrated with Home.
Some weirdness with doubling up on devices, but a remove and reinstall in Home fixed that. It also doesn’t seem to remove deleted devices, so be careful which of your devices you choose to add to the bridge. So, I had to do the same thing, remove the entire Hue link and re-add it again.
Also, scenes which are part of a particular room are fired when you say “turn off all the basement lights” so if you also have a scene assigned to the room “basement” which turns ON some lights it will fire and those lights will turn on.
Once you figure all that out though, it works like a charm.[/quote]
The ha-bridge docs say that the Google Home app should pick up device changes without a reload as is needed with the Echo, but I also saw the duplicated device problem after changing some devices in the bridge. Looks like a bug on Google’s part.
If you are going to assign rooms, it does appear you should only do it for lights that you want to turn on/off for the entire room when asked for. Scenes should probably remain unassigned.
I’m also seeing it mess up a little when I have devices that are the same name as a room or close to it. For instance, I have a room called Kitchen and in that room are 2 devices, “Kitchen Light”, and “Breakfast Bar”. Telling Google to “turn off the kitchen light” results in it saying it is turning off two devices, which is the action is should take if I said “Turn off the lights in the kitchen” My guess is that it maybe recognizes two forms, “Turn off the kitchen lights” and “Turn off the lights in the kitchen”. Same thing happened upstairs. I have the room “Master Bedroom”, with two lights, “Master Bedroom Light” and “Master Bedroom Closet”. My saying “Dim the master bedroom light to 5%” resulted in it also proclaiming it was dimming 2 devices to 5%. I probably either need to do some renaming of the devices to make them more different, or just unassign the rooms in those cases where it can’t seem to get it right.
But overall, I’m glad to see it working and this will be a good stop gap until Google comes out with their own API supposedly in December where maybe I won’t need the extra server software running.
[quote=“brucehvn, post:6, topic:194444”][quote=“jaccord, post:5, topic:194444”]Can confirm I got this to work today.
Downloaded HA Bridge, figured out getting it set up, and it pretty easily integrated with Home.
Some weirdness with doubling up on devices, but a remove and reinstall in Home fixed that. It also doesn’t seem to remove deleted devices, so be careful which of your devices you choose to add to the bridge. So, I had to do the same thing, remove the entire Hue link and re-add it again.
Also, scenes which are part of a particular room are fired when you say “turn off all the basement lights” so if you also have a scene assigned to the room “basement” which turns ON some lights it will fire and those lights will turn on.
Once you figure all that out though, it works like a charm.[/quote]
The ha-bridge docs say that the Google Home app should pick up device changes without a reload as is needed with the Echo, but I also saw the duplicated device problem after changing some devices in the bridge. Looks like a bug on Google’s part.
If you are going to assign rooms, it does appear you should only do it for lights that you want to turn on/off for the entire room when asked for. Scenes should probably remain unassigned.
I’m also seeing it mess up a little when I have devices that are the same name as a room or close to it. For instance, I have a room called Kitchen and in that room are 2 devices, “Kitchen Light”, and “Breakfast Bar”. Telling Google to “turn off the kitchen light” results in it saying it is turning off two devices, which is the action is should take if I said “Turn off the lights in the kitchen” My guess is that it maybe recognizes two forms, “Turn off the kitchen lights” and “Turn off the lights in the kitchen”. Same thing happened upstairs. I have the room “Master Bedroom”, with two lights, “Master Bedroom Light” and “Master Bedroom Closet”. My saying “Dim the master bedroom light to 5%” resulted in it also proclaiming it was dimming 2 devices to 5%. I probably either need to do some renaming of the devices to make them more different, or just unassign the rooms in those cases where it can’t seem to get it right.
But overall, I’m glad to see it working and this will be a good stop gap until Google comes out with their own API supposedly in December where maybe I won’t need the extra server software running.[/quote]
I agonized over cleaning up the names of devices, since what little pattern I had was confusing and not designed for voice activation. Luckily, both HA Bridge and the Home app make it easy to assign nicknames, leaving my actual device names untouched.
Ugh. I’ve been trying this, I can’t figure it out. I have ha-bridge running, but I can’t get the Google Home to connect to it. It just doesn’t see it. It’s all on the same network, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I click to Pair in the Home app, and nothing. 
(BTW, are they freaking serious with a Captcha and 3 questions to answer before posting?)
I will have a Google Home agent soon … it should work on your android phone, tablet, or google home device.
This will support simple discovery/device management.
Multiple Vera’s …
Multiple Google Home devices …
I also have a Vera Alerts Profile that I plan to release with this that will allow you to send Vera notifications (as Text to Speech) to some/all of your google home and google cast devices.
This requires installing something on an always running server (RaspberyPi, Windows, Mac …) device. Sorry you can’t run on Vera because it requires a Java virtual machine.
I’ve got the ha bridge running and it works great so far. I really don’t see any advantages of the echo over the home besides price of the dot…
I've got the ha bridge running and it works great so far. I really don't see any advantages of the echo over the home besides price of the dot...
You will start seeing this as APPS that use the new Google Home api start rolling out.
Initially apps are COMMAND - RESPONSE … If it does not understand the COMMAND it stops.
With the new API … it will be much more conversational …
You can say your device name … and it will ask what you want to do with it …
When that’s done you can also say something like “Also some other device name” and it will do the last command on that device as well.
This is thanks to an AI (artificial intelligence) engine that knows/learns about natural speech. The developer trains the model … and can update the model.
But this is language specific … So in my case I will be doing English only.
I have both Google Home with HA Bridge on Raspberry Pi: I also use Tasker, Autovoice with IFTTT integration. I love it thus far. Just bought the Echo Dots and using the Beta Echo Vera with it. I like Google Home with HA Bridge the best though.
Sent from my SM-N920P using Tapatalk
got my first google home today and have been poking around to see what i can do with it. so i take it my only current option is playing with ha bridge? i’m not familiar with it… does it allow one to control lights, thermostats, scenes?
The HA bridge only has four commands. On, Off, Bright and Dim. Really, Bright and Dim are the same command line. You can’t set a thermostat with it (I use ITFFF for that but even that is simplistic and not ideal). You can’t manually set a device and have the Google Home, through the bridge, report the current state. Of instance, Home may think a light is on. I can tell it to turn the light off, then Home thinks the light is off. But if I use something other than Home to turn the device off, Home doesn’t know this and still thinks the light is on.
Keep in mind that this is a limitation, as I understand it, based on the Hughe solution, and not necessarily the HA bridge.
I am waiting, sort of patiently, for a direct interface between Home and Vera. And as has been stated, Home is going to make huge leaps as developers start using the Google Actions SDK.
[quote=“RichardTSchaefer, post:11, topic:194444”]
I’ve got the ha bridge running and it works great so far. I really don’t see any advantages of the echo over the home besides price of the dot…
You will start seeing this as APPS that use the new Google Home api start rolling out.
Initially apps are COMMAND - RESPONSE … If it does not understand the COMMAND it stops.
With the new API … it will be much more conversational …
You can say your device name … and it will ask what you want to do with it …
When that’s done you can also say something like “Also some other device name” and it will do the last command on that device as well.
This is thanks to an AI (artificial intelligence) engine that knows/learns about natural speech. The developer trains the model … and can update the model.
But this is language specific … So in my case I will be doing English only.[/quote]
Awesome…great news and look forward to it. Definitely a fan of Vera Alerts and let me know if you need someone for beta testing
I do use the HA bridge to set my wifi thermostat. The Dim setting is the desired temperature. Works very well. Relies on the post/get interface supported by the thermostat. Anything connecting to the bridge thinks I have a light bulb named “heat”.
I may look into that! I was JUST able to add my Honeywell into Vera, so I didn’t even have a Thermostat in Vera until the last few weeks. Thanks for the tip!
I’ve been using the HA bridge running on an old Raspberry Pi I had (ver 1 or 2, no hestitation at all) to interface with a Google Home and it works awesome. I can say “Set living room light to 10%” and it sets them. The wording seems to be very flexible from what I can tell. The ONLY issue I have is that it’ll sometimes pickup all of my lights when I only want one turned on. For instance, if I say “OK Google, turn on living room lights”, it’ll respond that it turned on 20+ lights. But without saying “lights” and only saying “light”, it responds with “OK, one light turned on”. I REALLY like that I can obfuscate what I name the scenes and devices thru the HA Bridge app. I like it so much that even if Vera or some other developer decided to offer a plugin that didn’t offer this obfuscation, I would likely just keep using the HA Bridge. I also use the IFTTT site for some things that I don’t have in Vera, such as my sprinklers. I don’t believe the hype. Yes, Echo (Amazon) got a head start for this type of device, but Google has a massive head start for the environment it runs inside of.
I would highly recommend the setup I have.
I am still unable to get the ha-bridge running with Google Home.
I can see the Vera in the bridge control panel. I can see the Hue lights (After I pair…do you really have to do that again after any time the computer reboots?)
But I can’t figure out getting the Google Home to talk to it. When you add the Hue bridge to the Google Home in the Home app, it wants to add the physical bridge. You’re not supposed to do that, right?
What happens when you test in the HA Bridge? Can you turn lights on\off\dim? What do you see when you open the Home Control option in Google Home? I see all my advertised devices listed under the Phillips Hue. You are running the bridge on port 80? Are you running the latest HA Bridge version? My Home Control option in Google Home lists all the devices I’ve ported from Vera in the HA Bridge. All I have to do is make a change on the bridge and those changes are picked up straight away in the Home Control. I can also browse to my HA Bridge from any machine on my network by using my server address. You could test that way to see if you bridge is advertising.