Voice Control

Almost everything can be voice controlled these days. Ask your phone, and it'll tell you stuff you didn't know you needed to know. Apple, Google, Amazon and others all have voice assistants that can be used for control of appliances, buying stuff or just entertainment. Node Red has nodes that support most of these assistants.

I have been mostly using the Google infrastructure, since it is typically more open. It isn't perfect, but it does allow me to develop apps and write blogs. I have had some success using their tools for automating my home.

NOTE: gbridge is no longer a solution. The company no longer supports this application. 

I am using the gbridge node. The setup is very simple, using a standard MQTT interface to their service. It does take some registration on their web site, and in the google home app. They support multiple levels of usage, and allow self hosting. The self hosting can be done on the same RaspberryPi that Node-Red/Mosquitto is running on. The free service allows 4 devices, and more than that will require a subscription, and you choose how much to pay.

Setting up something simple

In the account on the gbridge site, you can set up various devices, what traits (open, close, on, off, etc) those devices will exhibit and what the topic and payload is allowed. This must be done before adding the node to node red.

I connected this to my most complex flow, and it worked right out of the box! After following the setup steps properly. The flow is very simple:

Just an MQTT input node, a debug node and a connector. The connector goes to the heater flow in the previous post. The single "google voice" node could go right in the heater flow without adding much complexity to that flow.

The MQTT node has some configuration:

The server is the gbridge server. This is another MQTT agent that the Node-Red will talk to . It should be set up as any other MQTT agent is added to node-red (like localhost for any of the connections to mosquitto running on the Raspberry Pi).

The URL will have your user number in it. This is your number, and shouldn't be shared with anyone, unless you want others to control your home. The uNNN is my number obfuscated, so I can prevent you from controlling my house.

Once all that is set, using a google assistant (voice or typing), I enter the command "set sunroom thermostat to 80" and the thermostat setting will change to 80 degrees. The payload from the MQTT node is the temperature.

The voice assistant understands other commands like "make it cooler", "make it warmer", but my flow doesn't know what to do with those commands. The payload from the Google Voice MQTT node will send "3" for make it warmer, and "-3" for make it cooler. This could be used in a function node to adjust the current temperature, but for now, I won't use them. What happens now, the thermostat will be set to 3 degrees if the "make it warmer" command is asked.

There are other topics that can be used by node-red to allow querying the status of the node as well. The "gBridge/uNNN/d1000/tempset-ambient/set topic allows me to ask the google assistant what the current temperature is in the room.

I'd like to ask the current state of the garage as well. I've driven off many times, and been unsure if I shut the garage. MAybe in the next post, I'll show how to do that. I also want to show the library that I have made to simplify the nodeMCU development, and other things. There is lots to come.

Ask any questions.