Google Home Presence Detection

Do you have to open the hubitat app for it to work? I have a pixel 3 and have a rule to open my garage when I get home. It only really works when I open the hubitat app. I have the settings set to always have hubitat know my location. Last week my fiance was home and 3 hours later the garage opened. She has a iphone 11 and I have all the proper settings for her as well. I was hoping this worked better than IFTTT but it seems like the same hit or miss with this app as well

I think you have this confused with the Hubitat mobile app presence detection. I have that set up on both phones as well and it is not even close to being as reliable. And I am on the Beta.

This thread is about the new presence detection in google home app

Yeah, my bad

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I just noticed this insult to Muppets. Apologize, please. :wink:

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With Life360 broken, I have been looking for an alternative for presence detection and found this thread about using google home for detection. However, I could not get it to detect presence at all.

I followed this instruction, except for the step " You've enabled your phone in presence sensing settings in the Home app" , which I can't find such setting in the home app?!

Anyone has any experience on how to go about getting it to work? TIA

A suggestion...

Yeah, thanks, will look into OwnTracks. I worried it'd follow the footstep of Life360, and having to keep changing and configuring new presence detection is really not fun. Was hoping google home will be straight forward because I already have it setup (not properly apparently because presence doesn't work at all lol).

I use google home for my wife and I and it works flawlessly so far.

No bells/whistles like Owntracks, I have been watching that thread and may use it eventually.

Shouldn't suffer that same fate. OwnTracks is just a standalone mobile app (open source) sending locations, with all the control done in Hubitat. This is different than Life360 where the app talks directly to the Life360 cloud server.

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How do you do presence with google home? I'm interested in checking into this!

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These routines turn on/off a virtual presence switch in hubitat.

Very crude but reliable so far.

We still have life360 on our phones not connected to hubitat if we want to spy on each other LOL

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I haven't tried it but you can put any address in the routine, so you could have a switch for work/home/school etc...

Nice! Thanks for sharing that.

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Just in case anyone else has the same issue I've been chasing for the past few days I thought I'd chime in:

I had been using both the Hubitat app and Google Home for determining presence, and recently Google Home stopped working correctly. Both my wife and I got new phones in the past few months, so it may have had to do with the setup of the Google apps on the new phones, but it also could have broken due to app updates or some other gremlins.

I have both the Google Home and Nest apps installed since I have a few Nest smoke detectors. They both have home/away functions and the way they interact is confusing at best, and broken at worst. What is working for me at the moment is to use the Nest app to determine home/away, which results in the Home app showing "You're using this feature on a different phone. You can switch to this {Device model}".

I've tried a few times to turn off the home/away function in Nest and turn it on in Google Home, but that hasn't seemed to work for me, so I'm just going with using the Nest app for now.

Have you tried using the built-in presence sensing instead of the 'when I arrive at a location'?

Home app -> Settings -> Presence sensing -> Allow this home to use phone locations

Your post may have solved the issue I just posted about... When I tried to set up a 'when I arrive at a location' automation, I found out that the Home app didn't have 'use precise location' turned on. I've turned that on and I'm going to see if I can turn off the Nest app and use the Home app instead.

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Yes I have that function setup too but not really using it in hubitat. It works with the phones in your home as " someone is home " or " noboby is home ". It works well too i just like having the seperate presence for each home user.

For example i like the yard lights to come on when i arrive even if my wife is already home.

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Ah... I didn't connect the dots on that and I agree, that is one of the things I don't like about Google Home presence. Not being able to see the individual phones makes it harder to troubleshoot if something does go wrong. I think I'll give the location-based routine a try using virtual presence sensors.

Thanks for posting!

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It works very well. I compared it with life360 for timing and it was the same or better for how quick it triggered.

It's really weird, my home app doesn't have this setting, even I updated to the latest version, and google home presence has not been working for me at all....

"Home app -> Settings -> Presence sensing -> Allow this home to use phone locations"

What setting are you missing? If you go make a routine/automation in home app can you select "when i arrive or leave a location" as a starter? you have to create it as a personal routine not a household routine