Is there plans for Google Home support?

Ideas
1

Hello, voice assistants become very popular, Google home with its Google Assistant in particular, but it is not easy to make them work with DIY projects in the right way. I know that many people (including me) use IFTTT as a link between Google Home (GH) and Blynk cloud and it works well, but it is an absolutely WRONG way of controlling devices via GH, here is why:

  1. There is no way GH can respond with sensor readings via IFTTT, and also there is no way to ask if a device is on or off, only control is possible.
  2. GH simply does not know that particular device exists (lights for example), and in which room it is, so I often hear “lights have not been set up yet” if I say command not precisely.
  3. If I have two or more GH in different rooms, then command “lights on” in the kitchen will mean turn lights on in the kitchen, NOT in the bedroom or elsewhere, that is exactly why in the GH app we set up in which room every GH is located.

Here is a good video from Google I/O about smart home with GH and how it should work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDI0H9F08n8

I want to mention that the difficult part is already implemented, I mean the connection between ESP8266 (ESP32, etc) and the Blynk cloud is implemented, the next part is to implement a connection between Blynk cloud and Google.
This is absolutely doable for an open source project, OpenHab did it for example.

I don’t force developers to do anything, I just think that it is the future. I am already grateful for Blynk the way it is, I just want to know about the future plans… Thanks!

1 Like
2

We get more and more requests for GH and Echo integration, so it’s definitely gets higher on the priority list.

It’s a pretty expensive development (and support) as any other development that relies on 3rd party technologies, so we are seeking the ways to fund this initiative.

Anyone who would like to participate in the server side and firmware side integration is very welcome!

4 Likes
3

@Pavlo

Yesterday I wrote a google assistant action that interfaces with three esp32 devices I have running on blynk. The skill/action uses the blynk rest API.

The action uses an http request to get the values of pins and then responds to the user about the status of various things.

The one issue I had was that I had to hard code my device tokens into the skill.

Is there a way to use any Blynk API to retrieve a list of device tokens associated with a user account / project? If so, then the action/skill could get a user specific list of devices when invoked to use with the rest API and be published for any user/customer of my IoT device.

2 Likes