Actions on Chromeast and Google Home?

[sgr]

For my first attempt at using Stringify I decided to create a flow that controls various things at bedtime. That would include turning some lights off and others on, turning off the Chromecast connected to my TV to put the TV into standby, and stopping anything that's playing on my Google Home speakers. It seemed simple enough but I gather there are no Actions on Google Assistant and I can't find a Chromecast Thing listed.

Google Assistant now accept two commands at a time (joined with "AND"), so I could create a shortcut that triggers a Stringify to handle the various light functions and either turn off the TV or stop streaming on my Google Home, but I see how I can do all three.

Is there any way to do what I'm attempting, or am I out of luck? Being a complete newbie I realise I might be looking at the task in entirely the wrong way, so I thought it was worth asking.

[scott2ya]

You can try adding ifttt into the picture, mostly I use ifttt too trigger a flow, (I love doing it that way because you create your own verbiage to trigger the flow) but you can also add them as a thing into your flow, for instant, you want to use Google with the AND, to control your lights, AND Google to stop your streaming, if you add iftt into the flow along with your lights and let it control your TV perhaps or flip it around. You might even be able to use one command and multiple ifttt things in one flow to simplify. Unfortunately I don't have a similar setup as you so I don't know that ifttt can control your TV or Chromecast, but ifttt has more capabilities that stringify at the moment. They've been around longer.

[sgr]

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried and got as far as selecting my Flow as an IFTTT trigger, but when it came to "Choose action service" for the IFTTT applet I hit the same problem: neither Google Home (or Assistant) nor Chromecast are listed as available choices.

[scott2ya]

Looks like you might need to get a smart plug. If you want something really cheap, and don't mind a little splicing, buy a 5-8 dollar sonoff switch. Put the sonoff into an extension cord, and plug your TV and Chromecast into it and problem solved. You can control the sonoff with both Google home, and IFTTT and even Alexa. The sonoff is well worth the money and there's so much more you can do with a sonoff. I bought 8 if them, hacked them to work with my smartthings, installed them between my outside flood lights and the relay system the previous owner installed, it was a pain figuring that mess out, but now they turn on when my Arlo cameras detects motion, and cost less than twenty bucks.

[jkhmr7]

I was wanting to do something similar a while back and if I remember right they is no way to get a 3rd party service like stringify or ifttt to issue commands to Google assistant in place of your voice. Maybe it's changed now and someone else can tell you different but I hit a brick wall with it.

[sgr]

Thanks, I have seen the Sonoff switches and I'm bearing them in mind for any suitable task that might come up, but I don't think this is it. I don't want to kill power to my TV, I just want to get the attached Chromecast to put it into standby, and I definitely don't want to power down my Google Home speaker(s).

[sgr]

That's disappointing, and really very surprising. The Google Home, a speaker that's permanently on, should surely make the ideal target for various Home Automation tasks: convenient outputs for custom doorbell systems, "someone has entered the driveway" alerts and so on.

[jkhmr7]

There must be a work around, surely, just saying I never found it

[sgr]

I'm not sure what kind of workaround there could be given that neither Stringify nor IFTTT seem to support either Google Home nor Amazon Echo devices as targets of any sort. Maybe the design of these devices means it's not feasible, or there's a reason that both Amazon and Google decided not to open it up.

If they can only be controlled by voice then, short of some Heath Robinson arrangement of having one speaker issue voice commands another, it seems likely to be a dead end at the moment.

[aaiyar]

@jkhmr7

There is no workaround to get Google Home or Amazon Echo to play announcements. However, the limitation isn't in Stringify; Google and Amazon don't permit it.

[sgr]

@aaiyar Yeah, that's the conclusion I reached. Any idea why they might have made that decision?

[aaiyar]

Any idea why they might have made that decision?

On the face of it, it can be terribly insecure.

[sgr]

Ah. A bit surprising when it's considered secure to act upon so many other Things from the likes of IFTTT and Strigify. Presumably there are special concerns for these devices.

[hwanning]

I can understand their decision. Sooner or later advertisers would get their way in that way and then the devices would be dead/unusable for a lot of people.
If you've got some IT experience and willingness to fiddle, you can get notifications going by running https://github.com/harperreed/google-home-notifier-python eg. on a raspberry pi on your network, have a listener with an 'open' port reachable from the open internet (need some token identification of course) and then use webhooks in ifttt as the action. I've only tried the notifier part, works nicely. Happy to hear any feedback of someone making it work the whole way through.

[sgr]

Thanks, that could potentially be useful some time so I'll bear it in mind. I dont think it could satisfy the requirement in the original post though, as that was about controlling the devices (stopping music playing on a Google Home, getting a Chromecast to put its TV into standby).

Ideally I'd like to be able to send commands to the Home as if I had spoken them.

[angus_marshall]

New IoT Project!

[sgr]

Very inventive