Google Home my first impressing with using

They are enablers so the description fits. Then again, I have 2 dots and probably would not have bought into the voice control aspect without enablers enabling. Now I’m looking into harmony, must feed the addition.

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I will be back to ST world tmrw. :slight_smile:

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We have a group… :sunglasses:

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HA is actually HAA but the second A is silent. Home Automation Addicts

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You’re safer to say in ‘few weeks’ they haven’t adopted ‘tomorrow’ yet…

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We really need a support group for this.

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Like I said, we have one. Like many such support groups, however, there is a considerable amount of enabling that goes on. :wink:

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Hello fellow enablers. Has anyone been able to get alerts/notifications from Google Home?

I have to admit, owning one has created a whole new round of excitement for HA. The HUGE plus is that my wife finally thinks HA isnt silly anymore. Being able to talk out the commands instead of fiddling with our phones has made a big difference in resistance to adoption.

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I also want to know about push notifications.

I ran into my first major issue today. My wife was doing some holiday baking and said hey google play some Christmas music. The music started playing and I went out to blow leaves. I got the blower out and put my bose noise canceling headphones and hit play. All was well until I saw her on the steps with an attitude. I stopped the music inside when I started up my music outside.

@RSclause Could you happen to be using spotify as your main music app for your phone / GH and have a individual subscription? The same happens with me. (not a google home issue, just overall with spotify). I typically have to switch music apps if spotify is playing so it doesnt stop on the other device. I use many music apps anyways so its not terribly an issue for me.

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. :tada:)

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. :sunglasses:

Oh, and google Home uses the Google assistant IFTTT service. No “that” there, either.

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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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