Google Home, not so smooth setup

Other Devices & Integrations Voice Assistants
#1

Hi,

I recently setup Google Home and i found several issues that need some fixing.

  1. Linking with Google Home got me to the Vera login page, and then back to the Google Home app (on andriod phone) without adding the service. No error message nothing. I found this was because my Google Home language was not set to English. After setting the language I could add the Vera service, and change the langue back to Dutch.

  2. In the Manage Google Home page all my controllers show, even the ones that do not/cannot support Google Home. Ether disabled, or a Lite.

  3. While setting the names in the Manage Google Home, it kept trowing error messages that names where invalid. After removing the underscore- and colon characters from some the error disappeared. However there are several other names with those characters. So why the error messages?

  4. This is the biggest issue: Several of the custom names in the third and forth controller are wrong, from other devices, and if I change them and hit save they get changed back to the wrong values. I think this is because the HTML id’s are not unique. I.e. id customeName_xx is set per controller and if you have multiple controllers you get the same name multiple times. This is a no-go for many browsers. The ids in a page must be unique.

  5. In the Google Home app curtains show as a on/off switch, but you can control the position.

Cheers Rene

#2

My integration went pretty smoothly, but I have the same problem with some devices showing up more than once. This is because of more than one controller having access to those devices. For example, I have a Philips Hue light showing up twice in Google Home. This is because I have the Philips Hue plugin for Vera and Google Home sees the instance of the device both in the Philips Hue controller and Vera. Unfortunately I could not find a setting that allows Google Home to hide one of these instances. In the integration with Alexa one can select which of the devices may be controlled by Alexa so I can remove the duplicates. Also, Alexa allows for customization of the devices’ names, which is very handy when names of different devices are too similar or awkward to pronounce.

#3

Hi @askoldstrat,

if you go to home.getvera.com and logon, you have Manage Google Home in the right top menu. There you can uncheck devices and scenes. Those will then not show in the Google Home app and thus not controllable via Google Home.

Cheers Rene

#4

That is awesome. I don’t know how I’ve missed that. Thank you very much for pointing it out.

#5

Np. Just know you may see odd behavior with the custom device names for second, third etc controllers. There is a problem with that form, so the custom name of one device may reappear later and keeps changing back to that wrong value (my item 4). I created a bug report so I hope Vera picks it up quickly.

Cheers Rene

#6

Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll report here if I see anything odd.