Apologies if this has been covered before but there seems to be so much information on the internet and knowing what is current due to firmware changes of all the interconnected devices is difficult.
I’m thinking about getting a Harmony hub. The primary goal would be to change television channels.
Hardware: Harmony Hub, SmartThings, Google Home, whatever the standard FIOS box is
Can I do the following with that hardware:
“Ok Google, change TV to channel 215”
“Ok Google, change TV to Food Network”
I understand that this may involve setting up a lot of actions, that’s ok. I don’t mind putting in a little time in front of the computer to get the desired results.
Not only can you do it, you can do it really easily.
Both Amazon echo and Google home have native integration with harmony now. So you don’t have to put SmartThings into the picture at all, although you can if you want to, say, have a motion sensor turn on your television. But for voice control, the native integrations work best.
You just link your harmony account to your Google home account, and after that you can say “OK Google, ask harmony to switch to channel 5”
Believe it or not, “ask harmony” would be a deal breaker.
With OpenHab, since it didn’t have native Google Home integration I had to set up control through IFTTT. Doing so was possible, but with a keyword. For example “Ok Google, ask Betty (what we named our HA system) to turn on kitchen Sonos”. My wife never used it, thought saying “ask Betty” was stupid. Now with ST she can directly say, “OK Google, turn on Kitchen Sonos” and uses it every day. Little detail, but one that is important to her.
You can do it through IFTTT as well which gives you more choices for the control phrase, but a more limited feature set as the only thing you can use for the "that"in the IFTTT harmony channel is a Harmony Activity. It’s still easy to change to a channel, but you lose easy access to volume up and down and pause and play. It can still be done, but it’s a lot more work.
So you don’t have to put SmartThings into the picture at all, although you can if you want to, say, have a motion sensor turn on your television. But for voice control, the native integrations work best.