This can’t be how SmartThings is meant to work. It just can’t. I refuse to believe it could be this bad.
My wife and I have separate Google accounts. Pretty normal.
We have many ST Routines which Google Home calls Scenes.
I have added ST to Google Home, and in my Google Home account I can create Automations that include ST Routines / Scenes.
But when my wife tries, the Scenes do not appear on her Google Home account.
To be clear, all ST devices do appear on her Google Home account, only Scenes do not.
Logically, I therefore tried adding ST to her Google Home account. It then created duplicates of every one of our 68 devices!
Now when asking, “Hey Google close the blinds” it replies, “Okay closing 24 blinds”. We have 12 blinds.
It’s a problem because Google Home devices respond to the user’s voice who is asking them, therefore she cannot interact with the smart home fully using her voice, but I can. She’s now asking me to come into rooms to trigger ST Routines for her.
Just ridiculous really.
Tl;dr How does my wife activate ST Routines via Google Home Automations, just like her husband can?
You could create virtual switches in ST and use them to trigger Scenes (manual routines) in ST. And then your wife could actuate the virtual switches in Google Home.
This is a long standing issue with Google affecting many different third party platforms. They broke it several years ago and don’t seem to care.
If you import a Scene into Google only the user that imported it is able to see it, and then only when creating routines, unless the Scene is assigned to a Home and a Room which makes it visible to all members of the household.
The problem is that, unless the Scene is assigned to a Home and Room as part of the linking process, there is no longer any way to do the assignment. It used to be possible if you could find where Google had hidden the Scene but it was constantly moving. It eventually settled down to be under Home control in the Assistant settings where you could list all your devices linked from a particular third party service. Then one day it wasn’t there any more.
Once upon a time you used to be given the opportunity to assign Devices and Scenes to Homes and Rooms on linking SmartThings, but that stopped years ago. I believe some services can still do it.
So basically it is yet another bizarre quirk of Google Assistant/Home, sitting alongside their reckless abuse of user security/privacy in their speakers, being years behind in supporting even rudimentary sensors consistently, and the voice assistant increasingly seeming to be as thick as slurry.
