What's the best way to set up item that are already set up inside Google Home

Should I wipe everything out of google home and import them with Hubitat, or just leave them inside Home and also add them to Hubitat?

What type of devices are these? My guess is they are all WiFi connected devices. If so, you may have difficulty trying to integrate these with Hubitat directly. Hubitat only officially supports a limited number of WiFi devices. Be sure to check the official supported devices list.

Unofficially, there are many Community written integrations with WiFi devices. These will require you to install custom Apps/Drivers. Many of these are fine (especially the ones written by yours truly :wink: ), however some may result in hub stability issues. So, best to do some research before installing any custom apps and drivers.

Well I have all of my lutron lights, hue bulbs, and google homes set up inside the Google Home app.

I'm trying to figure out how I need to reconcile that with setting up Hubitat. Do I need to unlink all of them from Home first, or not.

Ahhh! Very nice.

Google homes can be left alone. No need to remove them from Google whatsoever. Doing so would render them useless.

For Lutron Caseta, you’re going to need a SmartBridge Pro to integrate with Hubitat over the LAN via Telnet. This is an awesome integration. I have replaced all of my switches, dimmers, and fan controllers with Caseta devices. You can choose to leave Lutron directly integrated with Google Home/Assistant, or you could remove them from Google and use Hubitat’s Google integration to share them. There are pros and cons to both approaches. Just don’t expose them to Google with both methods at once, or you’ll get duplicates. I’d be tempted to use Lutron’s direct integration with Google Home/Assistant. Any change you make will still be instantly reflected to Hubitat via its Telnet integration with the SmartBridge Pro.

As for the Philips Hue bridge, I don’t have one so no first hand experience. One thing I do know is that Hubitat’s integration with the Hue bridge, while local over the LAN, uses polling to check if any bulb has changed independently of Hubitat. For example, if you use the Hue App on your phone, or use Google Home direct integration with your Hue bridge, these changes will take up to about 1 minute to be seen by Hubitat. So, if you want to avoid those delays, you may want to expose these Hue bulbs to Google Home only via the Hubitat integration with Google Home. This way your voice commands will be issued via Hubitat, and the to the Hue bridge. Hubitat will therefore know the status change instantly.

Hope this helps!

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It's important to distinguish between Google Home, which is a speaker, Google Assistant, which is a voice assistant, and the Google Home App, which is, I believe what you are talking about here. You don't have to remove them but you are going to end up removing them anyway. So, basically, yes, all of your devices will have to be set up again in the Google Home app. They will all end up being replaced by the ones generated by Hubitat. You cannot integrate Google Home devices directly to Hubitat. Google Home can control Hubitat devices, not the other way around.

Doing this you will have to re-integrate post setup of the new smartbridge pro, either directly to Google Home or through Hubitat. You cannot move the data from your old smartbridge. So, that will all have to be redone in the Google Assistant.

Phillips Hue
You can integrate directly from the Hue bridge to HE. No need to go through GH. Simply install the Hue app in HE and follow the directions in the app.

That is correct....however, they will be all new devices in Google Home. So, you will have to set them up (by room) all over again. None of that can be saved.

As for the google home speakers, you can use them for TTS announcements, but they can remain set up the way you have them connected to your wifi now. There's no need to wipe them. However, if you did, you would not lose anything. The setup of your Google Home speakers doesn't contain any device data or data on any of your devices. That is all contained within the Google Assistant. Think of them less as "Google Home" and more like "Google Assistant Interaction Devices".

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I have different apps linked with my Google Home account for porting smart home devices into my Google Home account, and also a majority of them are on HE as well (i.e., Philips Hue, Lutron - have integrated in HE with the pro bridge, August lock, Bond for shades, TP-Link Kasa outlets... basically all but LG washer/dryer, Dyson fans, and iRobot Roomba). Is there any benefit to removing the Google Home integration and having them port over to Google Home via HE instead (e.g., faster responses, speaker would still work for controls if WiFi is down, etc.)? Or is leaving them setup separately basically the same? As of right now, the only devices I have porting from HE into Google Home are my Sengled bulbs.

The only real advantage to routing all Amazon Alexa/Google Home traffic through the Hubitat hub that I know of is, the devices will update their status in Hubitat more quickly.

Let's take the Philips Hue bridge as an example. Hubitat uses a local, LAN-based API to communicate with the Hue bridge. There is no instant status updates with this API. Therefore, if one uses the Hue App on their phone, or an Amazon Alexa/Google Home device, to change the status of a Hue light, it will take Hubitat up to a minute to notice the bulb has been changed via an external source. This is because, by default, Hubitat polls the Hue bridge every 60 seconds to see if anything has changed. But, if the Hue lights are exposed to Alexa/Google via Hubitat only, the status updates will be in real-time.

So, in general, if devices still report their status instantly back to the Hubitat hub, I will typically use their native Alexa Skill/Google Integration (e.g. the Lutron Caseta integration.) Otherwise, I route the traffic through Hubitat so it is kept up to date as quickly as possible.

YMMV, of course! :slight_smile:

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One interesting thing... I've been having issues with my Bond integration for my shades with GH, so I tried connecting them to GH via HE (via the Bond HE integration) and they're working with that workaround...but they do show up as "switches" and the "shade" device type isn't in the list of "popular device types" that you can pick from, even though it shows up as a shade when it's ported in via the Bond GH integration.