Your noise canceling headphones canceled the noise. lol Not even Thanksgiving yet.
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I always use Google play but I need to get her to try Pandora or possibly cast Amazon prime music to the kitchen GH.
Will GH even play Prime Music? It’s not one of the listed music streamers they show and Google doesn’t play with Amazon well.
I think the only way to make that work is if you can chromecast prime. Because I have never used prime music I am not sure if it is possible. Not sure if amazon prime music plays in an app or a browser, if browser it should be possible.
My question is: can google home function as a true assistant?
“Home automation” is only one component of a truly smart home. There are some activities that cannot be automated, such as taking out the trash. A truly smart assistant should remind you of those activities, without you having to ask.
I wrote a Tasker profile that does the above, and spoke of it here some months ago. It accounts for holidays, and specifies which stuff goes out on which day. But such a schedule-reminder could easily apply, for example, to prescription medications. If your uncle forgets to take his pills, perhaps a reminder that blurts itself out is what is needed. Heck, it could be integrated with your google or work calendars and speak out those reminders! It could tell you “your car is due for inspection by January 12” each day until you mark that task completed. Etc.
Alexa cannot do this. In fact if you look at IFTTT, Alexa shows as an ‘if’ but never as a ‘then’; it apparently cannot respond to any stimuli aside from a human voice or its own app.
If Google Home can be a ‘then’, IMO it will win this race by a mile despite Alexa’s 2+ year head start.
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It’s true that the official Amazon features are not proactive. Nor is there text to speech support. But you can ask Alexa what’s on your calendar, which is nice.
If you want to go further than that, you can use the fact that echo can be a streaming Bluetooth device and play notifications on it that you have set up on a different device, like your android phone. A number of people in the community have done that, and there are other threads about it.
( you’ll see in the following thread that initially I didn’t think it would work, but the guys made it happen. 
)
You can also check into AskAlexa, I can’t remember if that does proactive stuff or not.
http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=Ask_Alexa
So right now if you’re willing to have a separate device to be the brains and just use the voice assistant as the voice, you can get this functionality from an echo, because the echo can also be a Bluetooth speaker. But I don’t think that’s available on Google home yet.
I do expect that all the voice assistants will add an official TTS feature in 2017, it will be interesting to see which one does so first. 
And then there is the app EchoSistant. Which is growing and evolving to become a true assistant.
I would like to see your taker and talk to you about integrating that into this app.
And hopefully when the GH api is opened we can branch into that service.
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Anyone success to get GH to change the smart bulb color?
it works with my LIFX bulbs
So then, EchoSistant takes words spoken into one Echo, temporarily stores them somewhere, then speaks them on a different Echo?
Does it accomplish that via Bluetooth?
Or does it do it via some other method?
If it is not communicating the spoken phrase via Bluetooth, then Echo CAN be made to respond to other stimuli. That would be exciting, because then indeed you could write a skill that would reference external calendars autonomously or semi-autonomously.
But for the short term I will be re-routing the BT audio of my front door Smarttiles-Tasker based control tablet into the Echo Dot. I just need to come up with a decent mount to replace the BT speaker that’s up there. With the Dot always on, the occasional BT keep alive failure will be a thing of the past. Sound quality won’t be as good, but that’s ok - I can always just tell Alexa to connect to a BT receiver attached to my audio system if I want it to sound better.
Unfortunately at this time we can not push a message to an Alexa device… This app is sending the tts to speakers.
Works on my osram bulbs and strip
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Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Rumor has it that that may soon change:
But you never know. Sometimes it takes mfg/developers awhile to implement even their promised features, let alone that which they have not promised.
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Alright, I’m in business.
I can ask Alexa if I have anything scheduled at a particular date and time.
I can tell Alexa to add a calendar event.
My android control tablet, using Autonotification, intercepts all calendar notifications and reads them aloud.
The tablet, being connected to the Echo Dot via Bluetooth, speaks the notifications out thru the Dot!
The variables you need to capture are
%NTITLE
%antext
It will say everything including location and other details.
That, to me, is the primary functionality of a PDA.
And it’s now operating in that basic capacity.
This is a problem with the “whole house music” approach. You end up forcing your music choice on everyone else in the house! Great if you live alone, or if you are a control freak and no one else in the family minds. Personally I consider it intrusive.
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Hi all,
So, can GH control ST devices using any other language than “turn on/turn off”? I ask because I have garage door openers and I want to say “Hey Google, Open Garage Door 1” or “Hey Google, Open the Garage Doors.” But this does not seem to work at all. GH will respond to “Turn on Garage Door 1” but that sounds actually a bit risque. 
Any ideas? Thx!
Jon
You can use IFTTT and then use any phrase you want. Google home uses the Google assistant IFTTT service/channel, and smartthings has its own channel, so you’re all set. The question is whether there is additional lag, and that just varies from house to house, so you can try to see if it works for you.
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As @JDRoberts has said, using IFTTT you can program any phrase you want to switch on, switch off, unlock, lock and activate / deactivate siren/strobe.
Not sure if this is enough for you but I’ve been playing with my Tado heating to make it more responsive to what I want. I now have several recipes in there which allows me to fully control it to do what I want.
Mind you having said that I’m sure my wife will find something that I will need to add. 
EDIT: The only problem you might come across is if the phrase you pick is close to your naming convention.
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Wow. that is a great IFTTT connector! I didn’t expect so much for V1.0. Much better than the Alexa IFTTT connector!
Is there a thread anywhere with the coolest IFTTT/GH ideas for voice-controlled automation?
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My Lennox iComfort thermostats are already hooked in via SmartThings, and while they sometimes decide to not be “active” when they actually should be (not sure what’s going on with the SM connector), GH is really great at just interpreting things like “set the temperature downstairs for 70 degrees” and it uses the room info to align with the thermostat device in that room (in this case, I created a room called “downstairs”) and it works really well.