Wondering if anyone has gotten dlna speakers connected through ST to work with GH.?
It cannot recognize them in my setup at all…
There are other ways to skin that cat.
I just completely set up my new Denon home theater system for voice control. The commands come from Alexa, thru IFTTT, and hit Tasker via AutoRemote. Tasker then sends them to the AVR. The thing is that the moment they hit Tasker, they can do anything linked to Tasker and vice versa. Enter Sharptools, and exalt in SmartThings automation of your home theater… 
Want Sirius to fire up Watercolors in the dining room at volume -34 when your wife arrives? Simply have Tasker do that when sharptools detects that her presence sensor has arrived. Want it to blast a dog barking sound near the closest detected outdoor motion when you are away? Have sharptools send the ID of that sensor to Tasker, which can then send telnet commands to change the volume levels of the various speakers as the person moves from area to area around the perimeter of your house.
Unlike others, I don’t really see the value of butting my head against the wall to try to get all the eggs in one basket (enough cliches? lol). All I care about is getting it to behave as I wish. If that means Tasker is the processor of the trigger instead of SmartThings, that’s fine by me.
Bottom line is that anything that can respond to network commands can respond to all these systems if you get hold of the protocols. In the case of the Denon, I’m utilizing mostly http command strings (unpublished protocol) - but in a couple of instances, I have to use telnet commands.
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So my dad has GH and Harmony hub connect together. He’s got it setup to turn on and off the tv. He is trying to get it to change the channel. Anyone know if you’re able to change the channel by telling GH to do it?
You can change the channel via GH, but you need to make a new activity for each channel. Harmony treats each activity separate. I have a few special channels setup, so say I tell GH “turn the TV on” it will fire up everything it needs and the TV will be on. By default I have it set to go to NBC channel. From there I can tell GH “turn on HGTV” and it will turn it to HGTV channel. This HGTV is a new activity, but since everything in the activity is the same as TV, it just changes the channel.
I guess you could setup an activity called Channel Up or Channel Down, but then you would need to make new activities for each. However you would be telling GH “turn on Channel Up”, just doesn’t sound natural. I am sure you could make a virtual switch for this in Smartthings, sync it to Harmony, then use IFTTT.com to sound more natural, but then you are at the mercy of how fast IFTTT wants to be.
Ken~
You can also only use an activity once in a row, so if you said “GH, turn on channel up” once, and then said it a second time, nothing would happen, as Harmony thinks that “Channel up” is already on. So folks wanting volume control have had to create two different activities for volume up and volume down (e.g., 1. GH, turn on louder, 2. GH, turn on more louder) and alternate between them to keep turning the volume up. Gets a little odd/cumbersome.
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Returning to the concept of voice biometrics, it’s apparently coming this year: Rokid Pebble, with an assistant named Melody. It does things like handle multiple accounts based on your voices, and it can consult multiple calendars to see if everyone in the family is free for dinner next Tuesday. The form factor looks pretty good too.
So Alexa is (of course) just the beginning, and google home a small step. This is gonna get better, quickly.
I expect GH to be able to do this fairly soon. Their pixel can already unlock your phone based on our voice and it works well. Now if someone just happens to sound like you it may open. But my wife tried and all my kids and it they were not recognized. Just a matter of time before it comes to GH. GH I think was released to get it out there with minimal capabilities Well the power of google search is big and on certain things that alone surpasses Alexa but we will see more and more things come. And the good thing is you don’t have to add anything like skills they are just there. Of course if it requires an account you have to link them but that’s it. . Unlike Alexa where you have to enable skills to get them to work and then link an account if required. If they can just get the integration better with smartthings I will dump Alexa.
[quote=“joewom, post:1337, topic:48191, full:true”]
I expect GH to be able to do this fairly soon. Their pixel can already unlock your phone based on our voice and it works well. Now if someone just happens to sound like you it may open. But my wife tried and all my kids and it they were not recognized. Just a matter of time before it comes to GH. GH I think was released to get it out there with minimal capabilities Well the power of google search is big and on certain things that alone surpasses Alexa but we will see more and more things come. And the good thing is you don’t have to add anything like skills they are just there. Of course if it requires an account you have to link them but that’s it. . Unlike Alexa where you have to enable skills to get them to work and then link an account if required. If they can just get the integration better with smartthings I will dump Alexa.[/quote]
My guess is that Alexa will not be alllowed to languish. Amazon is in fact also working on voice biometrics for their system… for the first round, amazon has clearly won. They got a device out there that works pretty darn well for a first-gen item. Then they lowered the price enough, and made the device small and inconspicuous enough, and gave it a rich enough feature set, that it has now found its way into millions of households.
Actually, we can consider it a second-generation item. The first gen of this concept was Siri and ok google etc on your iPad or android. Very useful, but not intuitively useful. So if we compare it to the videotape wars of a couple decades ago, we could say that Siri and google now were Betamax… while Echo is (eat least for the moment) the VHS of the equation.
As for the possibility of google overtaking Echo, the words "installed base"carry huge weight in the market. Amazon accomplished that mission in 2016 with the $40 Dot. If Google wants to change that in their favor, they must produce a Dot equivalent - and they must allow something other than “ok Google”. You can’t stick that giant Airwick device on a wall or ceiling, and lotsa people can’t stand saying or hearing “Ok google” as the catchphrase. Folks focused exclusively on productive functionality will consider those objections silly, but are they really? The market will answer that question for us.
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Why should they when NVidia did it for them. And from reading on it is better the the Dot. Just plugs into an outlet. Which extends GH in any room you want. Alexa is good I am not putting it down. But its been out for years and skills work great it can not search and answer questions anywhere close to GH. I don’t want to hear I added bing results to the app. I want to hear the results. If I wanted to pick up my phone I would have just goggled it from said phone.
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Again, that is a question the market will answer for us. The ads from this holiday season actually illustrated, very clearly, the different concepts. Echo Dot commercials had the device obeying commands in particular scenarios, while the Google Home ads showcased its interactivity with young people.
Ultimately, I imagine both devices will live side-by-side in many homes. Which will be utilized in a given scenario? I can guarantee you that while a Google Home might eventually find its way into my living room or office, it certainly won’t be found on my kitchen counters… not when I have an Echo Dot stuck on the ceiling, out of range of food debris and splashing dishwater.
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Oh I agree. betamax and VHS all over again. Or if your not that old HD DVD and Blueray. lol. And now with Lenovo making a alexa just adds to the fray. So it seems both of their strategies is to partner with others to get more out. Google has done this successfully with TV manufactures when google tv didn’t’ do well. And the built in cast in my vizio works good and can be controlled via GH.
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Fyi for others following this chain this refers to (I assume) the fact that Nvidia is releasing a new Shield with Google Assistant and SmartThings integration (not sure if same way as GH, assume so) and a Dot like device that communicates with the Shield. This went over my head till I heard about the Shield announcement.
No its a small device that pugs directly into the wall. I think the price was released at 49.99. Now do you need the shield for it to work not sure. I read up on it briefly as so many things are coming out the yearly thingy. (technical term!) And as title says they also said lenovo made a better echo then amazon lol
Pretty sure it needs the main Shield unit to function based on this thread below. Just providing the info chain so I give credit where credit is due.
which references this article:
Which says this:
“It’s very similar to Amazon’s Echo Dot, though it doesn’t work fully standalone and requires the main Shield TV to function”
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I will read it when I get home. Did it say it needs the shield tv or can you purchase the other and it work.
Edit: Nevermind I found it:
That sounds great, but there are some drawbacks. You’ll still need to buy the new Shield TV to serve as the central hub for all your Spots. The Shield is also going to be the first Android TV product to come with Google Assistant support out of the box. Priced at $199.99, the Shield is already available for preorder and should ship later this month to buyers in the US, Canada, and select European regions.
Furthermore, each Spot will cost you $49.99, so the more rooms you need to cover, the more cash you’ll have to shell out to cover your entire home with Google’s Assistant.
It’s unclear at this time when the Spot will launch, as Nvidia only said it’ll be released at some point in the coming months.
It’s a hubba-hubba world out there! A network hub. Then another for wireless Ethernet (due to forced location of first hub). Then a SmartThings hub. Then a Hue hub. Then a Shield hub!!
I have a sneaking suspicion all these hubs will be obsolete in a decade.
But it sure is fun to be part of this wave.
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Decade…no way it’ll take that long. I’ve already scheduled my appointment to have multiple hub FWs uploaded into my frontal lobes… 
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So from the sounds of it Alexa can’t control sonos (specifically Spotify yet) I.e "Alexa play Eminem in the Lounge " and google home can only do this with chromecast?
I have playbar with two surrounds and use Spotify regularly. I’ve found SmartThings and sonos don’t play well together at all. For example stopping audio when I go away or setting sonos to play specific music from SmartThings.
If I knew either could do Spotify control on sonos via voice as I describe above I’d buy an Alexa or google home right now !
Is your Spotify account free or premium? Alexa has more control over premium Spotify, go figure. I use Amazon music (not the new unlimited) and iHeartradio mostly.
I actually have my Sonos speakers working with both Alexa and GH. I also have a Harmony remote. What I did to get this to work is:
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In Sonos app make sure the station you want has been added to your favorites
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Make an activity in Harmony and if you want it to work with Alexa name is Sonos (Music won’t work) If using GH then you can call it Music. You can really name it anything, but with Alexa it needs to be short, anything over 3 words and it never works. GH works with name I have thrown at it.
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Select your soundbar (You can only select 1 sonos speaker, but yours would be in a group anyways)
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Select your starting channel
In smartthings go and add the harmony remote and the new activity you made.
Find the new device under “things” and rename to what you made above. (remove the harmony activity part)
In Alexa app rediscover your smartthings and it should find the name you created above in Harmony
Now you can say “Alexa turn on/off Sonos” You can repeat the above to many different favorite channels, they just need a unique name.
The only thing you can do is group more sonos speakers together via voice or control volume for each. I know there are ways you can do this with AskAlexa or AskGoogle app pluggins. If you need volume control its pretty simple still, but since I use Harmony for the activity I can just pick the remote up and control volume
Ken~
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