I have just connected my SmartThings to Google Home (which I use for voice around the house), but I’ve got an issue.
It’s pulled across devices that I don’t want Google Home to see (some sensors)
But even worse, it’s pulled across devices as the wrong device type (i.e. I have some virtual switches that are identified as light bulbs, they were called names like ‘activate reading lights’ but even changing the name doesn’t alter the device type)
Can anybody tell me how I can change the device type in Google Home?
I’ve found a bunch of how tos and vids showing how to hide a device from google home - but unfortunately they are all using the old ST app, and I can’t find the same options within the new app. Anybody know where I should be looking?
OK, I found a way to set the devices to the correct device type.
For those of you who get this problem, this is how I sorted it:
1, Detached the google home and SmartThings
2, Renamed the switches within SmartThings to remove the word ‘light’ and replaced with the word ‘switch’
3, Reconnected Google Home to SmartThings - the switches were all then correctly identified
4, Renamed the switches within Google Home to a better name - Note that when I added the word ‘Lights’ back into the device name, Google Home changed the device type to ‘light (switch)’, but allowed me to change it back to ‘switch’.
5, Rename the devices within SmartThings back to a more meaningful name
Not sure if this will undo if you try and ‘reconnect’ Google Home to SmartThings (there is an option to do so within the GH settings).
Still need help in hiding devices from Google Home if anybody has any thoughts?
The new apps only been out for a month or so, how could it be reported a year ago? Not sure how long the beta was out but presumably it was reported during the beta testing.
Anyway, I know it was possible in the previous version of the app, I’ve seen videos showing exactly how to ‘hide’ a device from Google Home - but the option simply isn’t there in the new app
Here’s one example of a video from ‘Tech With Brett’ where he shows how to disable duplicate devices - essentially hiding the SmartThings device from GH:
I believe Nathan is referring to the app that replaced Classic, not the recently release refresh, whatever it was called back then. Yes, this has been an ongoing problem for a LONG time.
The latest Google Home integration in ST was released in the spring of 2020. That is what @nathancu was referring to.
The previous GH Home integration allowed you to choose which devices you wanted to appear in GH Home but that feature was removed in the latest version.
Correct - the Google and Alexa integration control the ability (or in this case the inability) to filter devices from their respective services. Which version of the app you use has absolutely no bearing on the feature. What you’ve asked for is the #1 most requested feature for all of Smartthings in the last year short of 'go back to Classic!" since the new Alexa and GH integrations were released.
Yes, I know yours is GH, but it’s basically the same issue. This one has better comms with the dev team on it - look for posts by Blake and Lars for ST responses.
It became a problem when the second generation voice skills were released back in April of 2020. And has been a problem ever since. You can find lots and lots of discussion of it in the forum, but that’s the bottom line. You could no longer individually authorize specific devices to the voice assistants.
A lot of people still say “new app“ when they mean the 2018 V3 app. That’s the one that replaced the 2015 classic app.
Just this month the 2021 app was released but only for android. People with iOS are still using the 2018 app.
I had the Google Home integration to SmartThings setup for about a month but found it didn’t do anything useful for me. I use Amazon devices for voice assistance and only tried the Google integration to see what it would let me do with my Nest cameras.
However, I did see that it was guessing device types based on device names. You can simply change the device type within the Home app. I can’t give you exact steps since I found that the integration was useless for my cameras due to the severely limited function Google exposed to SmartThings.
