I have a smart home skill already working fine with google home but when google home discovers devices for first time I want to group appliances into different rooms and relay this info back to google home. I know user can make rooms and assign appliances to them after sync event but I want to group them at the sync event so users wont need to do that from their end. Is it possible?
In your SYNC response you can return the roomHint property for each device which will provide a signal to the Assistant after discovering it.
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Is it possible to give Google Assistant commands programmatically? For example, I'd like to be able to send a command as text "turn on the fan" and have GA react as if that was the spoken command. I would also accept sending a JSON request in whatever format needed (with device IDs or whatever the API needs).
My situation is I have a ceiling fan that is controlled by Google Assistant. I want to be able to control it programmatically. For example, some event happens and my code wants to turn the fan on. Is there any way my code can tell GA to turn on the fan?
I tried using the Google Assistant SDK. I can send it text like "what time is it?" and get back text and audio, eg "It is 11:00am". However, I have a test device called "washer" and if I send text "is the washer running?" I get back "Sorry, I didn't understand". If I speak the words into my phone, I get back "The washer is running".
Why can't the GA SDK interact with my device? The credentials I give to the GA SDK are the same I use for my SmartHomeApp that defines the "washer" device.
To do this, you can setup up a virtual Assistant device and then send commands to it.
Check out Assistant Relay, which is a service that sets up a virtual Assistant device and exposes a REST API so you can send text commands to it, as if they were spoken.
Per the Documentation:
Simply send Assistant Relay any query you would normally send Google
Assistant, and Assistant Relay will call the Assistant SDK an execute
your command.
Per the problem you are having with the Google Assistant SDK, I believe what you are trying to achieve is only possible with a device, be it physical or virtual and not by using the SDK directly.
There are a lot of firewall and security issues allowing each smart device to to connect to the Internet. To alleviate this problem, Google's design methodology uses a fulfillment device as a bridge to connect to the device locally from one of their devices.
You are locally, on your smartphone, hooking into Google Assistant.
The phone is the fulfillment glue for the "washer" device.
According to this page:
Google Home or Google Nest device is required to perform the
fulfillment.
Due to the portable nature of cell phones, it does not make sense to allow one to be used as the fulfillment device remotely, hence the local hook.
I work for a tv/radio broadcasting company, and we stream live content through various devices through a web-based API, and we also stream through internet radio (such as iHeartRadio, Tunein, etc.). The API can also return things like show titles and descriptions.
I've been tasked with creating a Google Action that can be used to retrieve information from the API such as what's playing, what's coming up next, what shows are available, etc. It would be fantastic if Google Actions supported live-streamed content, but I believe they do not.
Since we DO stream through internet radio, I would like to create an intent that allows the user to be redirected from my action to the internet radio stream for our station. How would I go about doing that? I could simply tell the user to start a new conversation (e.g., "Say, OK Google, play 'My-Awesome-Radio'"), but it would be more user-friendly not to have to start a new conversation.
I'm looking for a way to store data for a Google Assistant action for all devices/users in a household, without requiring voice matching to identify a user.
I know you can store data in user.storage, but I don't necessarily want to require voice matching to link to a user, and if I use user.storage the data will only be associated with one user. I just want anyone on any of the devices (Google Home) in the household to be able to use the data persisted in the action.
One approach could be to obtain the device ID (if possible) when setting up the action and store the data by device ID. Then link all other devices in the household by device ID through the list of devices associated with the original user's account (if that's possible). Any other options?
This is currently not possible, there's no way to save data and have everyone in the household access it. I'm sure you've already seen the documentation on Save Data in a Conversation.
On shared devices like Smart Displays and Speakers, personal results are turned off by default. They can be enabled again following these instructions:
Open Assistant settings on your Android phone
Select device in "Assistant devices"
Turn Personal results on.
But this means other household members can see personal results, e.g. Calendar entries.
To determine if you will be able to use userStorage, you can use the recently launched GUEST/VERIFIED flag, see documentation here.
User storage is designed to work at a user-only level. If you don't have something like voice match setup, user storage will not persist. The best approach to having family or multi-person data sharing would be to use something like Google Sign-In to get their email, and then have a companion service like a website where users can share access with other emails. Then your service can pull from a common data source.
I have been experimenting with Google Smart Home and the protocol flow looks very clear for me. In summary:
action.devices.SYNC - sent by Google Smart Home to fulfillment service to find out the available devices
action.devices.EXECUTE - sent by Google Smart Home to fulfillment service to execute a certain action on a device
On the smartphone/tablet, the customer can place a device in a certain location. This allows him to ask questions such as Turn everything in my office off. Internally, Google Smart Home knows which devices are located in the office, and sends a action.devices.EXECUTE action for each device in the office subsequently, as explained above.
I am now wondering about the following: is it possible to retrieve the configured locations/rooms in the fulfillment service also? Is this information exposed and available to retrieve?
It is not possible to receive information about a user's home layout through the Home Graph API. When the user gives a command like "Turn everything in my office off", you may get several OnOff commands in your fulfillment, although you will have no way of knowing the original query.
Instead of querying my server every x minutes for changes in my Google Contacts I rather like a certain URL to be called when a contact has been added, updated or removed either through GMail or my iPhone.
Is there a way I can register callbacks to do so?
For instance, at this point I added my GMail account to my iPhone and iMac. When I open the Contacts.APP I can see all my Gmail contacts. When I add a contact it will automatically be updated on my iPhone, on my iMac and in the GMail webinterface. However, I like to know when such an event occurs to run additional tasks through the Google Contacts API.