Triggering Google Assistant Routines from Home Assistant

Introduction:

If you're like me, you probably love the convenience and automation that smart home devices bring to your daily life. One of the best ways to take advantage of these devices is by setting up routines in your smart home assistant, such as Home Assistant.

What is Home Assistant?

Home Assistant is an open-source smart home platform that allows you to automate and control your home's devices and systems. It supports a wide range of devices and services, including popular smart home products like Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Philips Hue. With Home Assistant, you can easily set up routines to automate tasks and make your home more efficient and convenient.

What are Home Assistant routines?

Home Assistant routines are automated actions that are triggered by certain events or conditions. For example, you can set up a routine to turn off all the lights in your house when you go to bed, or to turn on your coffee maker every morning at 6 am. You can even set up routines to control your thermostat, lock your doors, or turn on your security system. The possibilities are endless!

Home Assistant device support

The support for creating automations of the devices in the home is quite powerful and flexible.  One limitation is that it can only control devices where there are integrations with Home Assistant and have been added to the setup.  Unfortunately, not all devices can be directly integrated into Home Assistant. With the 2023.01 version of Home Assistant, now you can trigger Google Assistant commands from Home Assistant.

Google Assistant Routines

One of the primary use cases I have for this integration is triggering Google Assistant routines from Home Assistant.  Since Home Assistant has support for triggering routines with NFC tags, one example of this is triggering the "Good night" Google Assistant routine, when I put my phone on my bedside table.

Push notifications on the iPhone

I just received notification that the Remember The Milk iPhone application has a new update.  This update adds support for push notifications, where you will be notified if you a task scheduled for the day, without actually launching the application itself.

This had me thinking about some other applications that I think would be great to have push notifications added:

• Facebook:  to notify you when someone commented on something that you do, or sent you a message.


• Tweetie: to notify you when someone sends you a direct message


• Skype: to notify you of new messages.


• Games:  to notify you if someone "challenges" you, or if someone beats your high score.

I also think that there is an opportunity for another service.  Currently, if a developer wants to present notifications on the iPhone, they need to have a native iPhone application installed.  A lot of the "applications" that I use are web based.  I would love to receive notifications from these applications.

I think that it would be great if some developer wrote an iPhone application and a web service.  This application would talk to the web service to see if there are any notifications to be displayed.  Then other web services, using OAuth or Facebook Connect, would associate with this service.  This would allow notifications to be received from any web service.

I think that Facebook would be a good developer to do this, as they have the relationships with other developers, and they already support Facebook Connect.  But, I think that Apple will end up doing this in their MobileMe service.  This would be another reason to get users to pay for this service.