fasttimes

I’ll be honest that I’m very disappointed with Google with the portal. It’s much slower than Alexa. Especially if you are sending multiple commands. Like Alexa turn on lights <pause> Alexa turn off lights. Google seems to take longer to send the command, and then it requires a longer pause than Alexa does. I doubt this is has to do with the portal itself and how Google is sending commands to the portal. Also, Alexa picks up sounds better. I have one echo and google home mini right next to each other and the echo works about 90% of the time and the mini about 75%. What are your observations? Maybe it has to do with “Ok Google” is one more syllable than “Alexa”. I know “Hey Google” also works, but it doesn’t seem to work as well as “Ok Google”. The only reason I wanted to switch was the Google AI is “smarter”, but if it doesn’t listen to you as well, what’s the point? Hopefully Google will let you change the trigger phrase soon. What are your observations?

Does anyone know how this is supposed to work? I was able to train GH for my voice, and for my wife I setup a google account for her and linked it to GH. She was able to train it to her voice. I also set her AI to use the “male” voice so that we can tell which account GH is responding too. However I noticed that I had train each device. I noticed this because one of the GH responded to her with the female voice instead. These seems counter-intuitive, as you should only have to train once for all devices. Perhaps there is a good reason why it’s on a per-device basis, but I’d like to know the reason why.

Apparently this might have been a bug introduced in a September Google Home update. Does anyone know if assigning rooms from the ISY Portal ever set them on Google Home when linking?

LOL, where? Their “submit feedback” probably goes to a call center in Asia where they don’t understand and write it up incorrectly.

I asked Michel to share his thoughts. If it doesn’t allow it, it begs the question why the room feature is in the portal.

And THIS is the problem. Why can’t the linking take the room that you assign on the portal and set it in GH?

At the moment I have two GH minis. I have several echo dots, but was too lazy to create multiple accounts. There is the “wife factor” I have to consider. I don’t want to make it confusing for her, but I don’t want to annoy they hell out of her during setup time.

The ISY Portal allows you to assign/map a device to a room. However when I import my Universal Devices into Google Home, they all appear as “unassigned”. The portal says this field is (Optional - Not Used). In the Google Home app, I can then assign devices to a room. However if I need to re-import my devices again, I will lose all the mapping’s. Is there a way that when you import your devices the room mapping can also be set during the import?

I’m talking about devices that show in Google Home, but are not assigned to a room.

That sounds great! Can you share your IFTTT code? Does it allow you to dim to levels, like “set family room to 50%” ?

Yes it does. I might have to wait until my wife leaves the house for a few hours so I can play with this and not annoy the crap out of her turning of lights.

I have two google home minis, and will be probably getting a few more. When I setup my ISY scenes and devices in the Portal, should I set each one to a it’s own room? I tried “turn on the lights” and unfortunately it turned on EVERYTHING. Now I’m paranoid. I would like to be able to say “turn on the lights” where my bedroom GH mini hears me, and it executes a specific scene. I don’t want it turning on my bedroom fan, nor do I want it doing anything elsewhere in the house. It should know that when then bedroom mini hears “The lights” it means something very specific. Is this how GH works?

What happens if you have unassigned devices? Will “turn on lights” do everything?

Typo. Google Homes

You can train all your GHs with different family members? Do you only have to train each person once?

So let’s say I have two fans “Living Room Fan” and “Bedroom fan”, does that mean I can turn on either fan from any GV device and each specific GV I can use “turn on fan” and it will only turn on that fan?

So I picked up a few google minis at a sweet price. 20% off plus two $25 vouchers for Walmart on Google Express. I hooked it up to the portal and it works fine but was wondering how it's usage with the portal differs from Alexa. I noticed that Google Home allows you to assign devices to rooms, but I can't see what that does.

Alexa does a good job of controlling my ISY devices. How does Google Home compare? Now that the minis are out, I’m thinking of switching because I don’t like the Amazon AI

How can you setup something to tell the device status? For example, "Alexa, is the garage open" and get a "Yes/No" response.

You can tell if the door is open via a subscription? Does this work for Alexa?

I had this problem and had to rebuild my scenes manually. Paying extra for the delayed writes made this a lot easier. The delayed write is the green buttons on the toolbar. One for regular devices, and the other for battery operated devices.

So I took Scott's very gracious offer to call me and try and figure out what was going on in this gangbox. With the help of YouTube and my digital Multimeter I was able to identify the hot wires and the loads. During the call, I realized that one of the black wires was coming off a duct tape pigtail. Poking around, and scraping off paint the builders sprayed everywhere, we saw the pigtail was a bunch of neutral wires. Armed with that information, Scott developed a plan to test each load one at a time. But I wasnt getting the results I expected. It turns out that the insteon switches were bad. Replacing them (I always have a couple of new ones laying around just for this reason) and we got all of the switches working. We also identified the mystery wires and their function. They were leftover wires that were used for the original 3-way switches. I capped them off, as well as labeled them in case I have to replace more switches in the future. Thanks again to Scott and everyone else who offered suggestions.

I don't have the time to write a proper post mortem now, but I wanted to give a HUGE public thanks to Scott who called me and walked me through the wiring. We had a nice discussion bouncing ideas off each other, and in the end, our consensus approach did the trick. More to come...

Ok, the mess has been cleaned up somewhat. I pulled out my meter and found the hot wires. I touched those against the others to find the four devices. As I said earlier, I'm pretty sure the red wires are the travelers, as they each had round ends indicative of being attached to the traveler terminal of a standard 3-way switch. I'm not sure how to use the meter to test these and the two unlabelled black wires. If I had to guess, I would think those are the neutral wires. If those are the neutral wires, shouldn't I be able to pigtail those along with the white wires out of the insteon switches, pigtail the hot wires along with the black wires from the insteons, and then connect the reds on the insteons to their respective loads? ETA: Although, wouldn't it be easier to pigtail a hot & neutral with the 2 left most and right most switches? There's no requirement for all of the hots to be joined and neutrals to be joined, is there?

Sorry bout that. I did use slave in quotes first time.