Hey guys,
this is my first posting here, so please be patient with me.
Here is my situation: I’ve got two rooms, each has shutters controlled with a Shelly 2.5 and Fritz!DECT 301 Thermostats. I managed to get each device fully working in google home.
But here’s the problem: If I tell GA to close all shutters in room 1, the shutters in both rooms get closed. Same if I ask for the actual temperature in one of the rooms, GA always tells me both temperatures.
One room is named “Wohnzimmer” (German: Living room), the other is named “Stube” (German: sth like fireplace room).
I assume GA uses both names synonymously. Or do you think it could be wrong configured by me?
Everything else is working perfectly. Control and display of temperatures, heating modes, shutter position, no matter if I used OH, GA or the device itself to change sth.
Any ideas how I can get rid of this strange behavior?
Thanks in advance!
Google Assistant guesses when it doesn’t clearly hear the voice command, and in my experience is wrong about 30% of the time. I don’t think it would use synonyms, so it’s possible it’s only getting the “close all shutters” part (I don’t know what your actual command is) and, thus, closing all shutters.
Best advice I can give is to either give each shutter a unique name that you can call out, or set up custom routines that aren’t easily confused.
How have you set these up in the Google Home app? Do the shutters appear in a room?
Ultimately that’s what GA uses to know what rooms a device is in. If there is something amiss with your configs (e.g. typo in structure or room name hints in your GA Item metadata it won’t know what room they are in). Note that openHAB cannot create these I think. You have to create the structure and the room through the Home app and then you can provide the hints in your OH metadata and it should show up in the right place. But always double check.
I use the rooms as groups that suit my purposes, not actual rooms. My condo is open-concept, so defining by physical spaces doesn’t really work.
A few weeks ago, I said “turn on the air fryer”, but due to the noise from fans/AC, Google heard “turn on the apartment”. Fun fact: this will lead to GA turning every single thing on. This was followed by openHAB rules being triggered. So, openHAB turned everything off in “Away” mode, then switched to “Bedtime” mode and turned some things back on.
There is no particularly good reason that I can think of for such a command to exist.
As you can see in the first screenshot, the devices appear in different rooms.
In the second screenshot you see what GA answers if I for the temperature in the living room. (The temperature of both rooms Wohnzimmer and Stube are shown).
I tried now, what’s happening, if I speak in English to GA. Than everything works fine.
“What’s the temperature in the Wohnzimmer?” - “Die Temperatur wird auf 20° gestellt und es sind im Moment 19.5°”
Funny thing: I ask in English but GA still answers in German to me.
So I’m afraid it could really be a sth odd in the translation handling of German GA-inputs.
Instead of renaming the rooms, you could just set up custom routines for your most-used commands. Then the voice commands can be anything you want them to be.
I also would say this would be one of the quickest way to check if it actually is a naming issue.
Just rename “Stube” to something really different to “Wohnzimmer”.
I also have GA in German and use German room names and so far everything worked well.
The “trick” rpwong mentioned with the custom routines would be also a nice hack to circumvent some limitations.
FYI: I renamed “Stube” for testing to “Küche” (kitchen). And everything is perfectly separated now.
Although there is no room called “Stube” in Google Home anymore, every command for “Stube” is still applied to the living room.
I think that proves, that my German commands get translated to English first. So synonymous room names don’t work with GA in other languages than English.
