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3 posts tagged with "google assistant"

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ยท 3 min read
Quinn Damerell

Amazon Alexa Home Assistant with Homeway

Interested in voice controlling your Home Assistant with Amazon Alexa? You're in the right place! Setting an Alexa integration with your Home Assistant will allow you to control your lights, thermostats, TVs, alarms, and more with your voice or the Alexa app. It's magical! ๐Ÿช„

There ares a few ways to Amazon Alexa or Amazon Echo working with Home Assistant. We have made a list of our top choices, the pros and cons of each, and will tell you how to set them up!

Homeway.ioโ€‹

Homeway is a community project with a mission to empower the Home Assistant community with free, secure, and private remote access to Home Assistant. Homeway also enables secure Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support for Home Assistant.

Homeway is very easy to set up. Just install the Home Assistant add-on, and you're ready to go. The setup process takes less than 10 seconds; give it a try.

Prosโ€‹

  • $2.49 / month
  • Easy to set up
  • Lighting fast Alexa responses
  • Includes unlimited Home Assistant remote access.

Consโ€‹

  • No completely free options

Nabu Casaโ€‹

Nabu Casa supports Amazon Alexa when you sign up for their cloud service. The setup is easy: create an account, log into your Home Assistant, and enable the Alexa assistant.

Prosโ€‹

  • Easy to set up
  • Fast Alexa responses
  • Includes remote access
  • Supports Home Assistant

Consโ€‹

  • $5.50 / month
  • No completely free options

Manual Alexa Setupโ€‹

If you already have public internet facing remote access to your Home Assistant, you can manually set up your own Alexa Skill. The setup process requires quite a lot of work, creating Amazon developer accounts, creating Amazon Web Services resources, and more. It's quite an involved process and require maintenance to keep it working, but it might be a good fit for you if you're techy!

Prosโ€‹

  • Completely free to set up and use

Consโ€‹

  • Complex setup
  • Requires maintenance to keep working
  • Requires existing public internet remote access for Home Assistant.

Summaryโ€‹

Since the Alexa requires a secure Internet facing endpoint, most services require a low monthly fee.

Homeway is our top pick. Offering low-cost, secure, and private connections to Alexa. On top of that, you also get unlimited remote access to Home Assistant.

Nabu Casa is also a solid option, but it costs more to use.

Manually creating and setting up a Alexa Skill is complicated, but if you can set up and maintain the action, it's totally free!

We hope you find this post useful. We will keep this blog post updated with any service changes or new options, so check back soon!

ยท 6 min read
Quinn Damerell

Home At Night

Introductionโ€‹

Home Assistant is an incredible piece of technology. It gives you control over just about every device in your home, from Lutron and Hue lights to Nest thermostats, motion detectors, alarm systems, TVs, garage doors, and more.

You can level up your Home Assistant by enabling remote access, which allows you to check in and control your home from anywhere. But be careful; since Home Assistant holds a lot of power over your home, you want to use a secure remote access solution.

Here are the top remote access solutions for Home Assistant, along with the pros and cons of each.

Nabu Casaโ€‹

Nabu Casa is the remote access solution the Home Assistant team offers, known for its privacy and security commitments. It provides private and secure remote access and is built into Home Assistant.

Prosโ€‹

  • Easy to set up. No technical knowledge is required.
  • Easy remote access on any device.
  • Supports Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
  • Supports end-to-end encryption.
  • Strong privacy and security commitments.
  • Supports Home Assistant.

Consโ€‹

  • No free usage, $5.50/month for unlimited usage.
  • Exposes your local Home Assistant to the public internet.

Nabu Casa's remote access is done by generating a unique DNS name for your Home Assistant, with which anyone with the DNS name can access your local Home Assistant. The advantage of this approach is it's possible to have end-to-end encryption. The downside is that the DNS names can be found publicly, and they expose the entire Home Assistant API surface to the public internet. It also relies on your local Home Assistant account's security as the only layer of security.

Homewayโ€‹

Homeway is a community project with a mission to empower the Home Assistant community with free, secure, and private remote access to Home Assistant.

Prosโ€‹

  • Free for limited monthly use, $2.49/month for unlimited usage.
  • No public exposure of your Home Assistant to the internet.
  • Supports Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
  • Instant and easy remote access on any device.
  • Easy to set up. No technical knowledge is required.
  • Built on a worldwide server network, creating super-fast connections.
  • Strong privacy and security commitments.

Consโ€‹

  • Second layer of security makes end-to-end encrypted impossible.

Homeway's remote access has no public Internet exposure of your Home Assistant.

Homeway uses two layers of security for remote access. You must first log into your Homeway account for remote access, and then your local Home Assistant account to access Home Assistant. This two-layer approach is more secure, but the downside is Homeway can't offer end-to-end encryption. However, Homeway's Security Commitments explicitly cover that all remote access data is immediately destroyed after tunneling and isn't stored in any way.

Tailscaleโ€‹

Tailscale is a newly popular VPN solution that offers an easy setup and minimal configuration and is end-to-end encrypted. Tailscale requires users to install their app on all systems they want to be able to access remotely and to keep the VPN enabled for remote access.

Prosโ€‹

  • Free for individuals, with unlimited use.
  • Setting up is not too hard; it requires installing apps on your devices and minimal configuration.
  • End-to-end encryption.
  • Connections can be established peer-to-peer, allowing fast connections.
  • Strong corporate security and privacy commitments.
  • Used by thousands of individuals and enterprises.

Consโ€‹

  • No Alexa and Google Assistant support.
  • Requires apps to be installed that must be connected to the VPN for remote access.
  • Finding the correct website for remote access can be tricky since it's a VPN IP address.

Cloudflare Tunnelsโ€‹

Cloudflare tunnels are a new Tailscale-like VPN option for remote access to Home Assistant. They are free for individuals and offered by CloudFlare, a prominent and trusted internet company.

Prosโ€‹

  • Free for individuals, with unlimited use.
  • End-to-end encryption
  • Built on a worldwide network of fast servers.
  • Strong corporate security and privacy commitments.
  • Used by thousands of individuals and enterprises.

Consโ€‹

  • Is tricky to setup.
  • Less secure than Tailscale.

VPNโ€‹

There are many different VPN servers that are possible to set up. VPNs are the most manual way to set up remote access, but they are totally free and under your control. However, you must be careful to configure VPNs correctly and update them manually. They can be a great and free solution if you're techy and know what you're doing.

Prosโ€‹

  • Free for unlimited use.
  • End-to-end encrypted with private keys only you generate and have.
  • Connections can be established peer-to-peer, allowing fast connections.

Consโ€‹

  • No Alexa and Google Assistant support.
  • Can be confusing to set up.
  • If set up incorrectly, VPNs can publicly expose your Home Assistant instance to the public internet.
  • Requires port forwarding on your router, which exposes the VPN server to the public internet.
  • Requires a static home IP address or the use of a dynamic DNS service.
  • Requires a VPN configuration on your phone that must be connected to for remote access.

Port Forwardingโ€‹

Port forwarding is possible, but it's not recommended. Port forwarding is assigning a port number on your public IP address to map to an internal device, which would be the device running Home Assistant.

Most home ISPs will not allow you to port forward the typical HTTP and HTTP ports, 80 and 443. You also know your home IP address, which can either be static or set up with a dynamic DNS server. If you use port forwarding, it's also critical that you lock down your Home Assistant server and set up strong SSL for your web access.

The security community considers Port forwarding to be a thing of the past. Now that there are modern, strong security, and free solutions like Homeway and Tailscale, there's little justification for exposing your home network to the public internet as port forwarding does.

Conclusionโ€‹

Homeway and Nabu Casa are great options for integrated remote access for Home Assistant. There are pros and cons of each, as discussed above. Since they are deeply integrated into Home Assistant, they make it easy to start remote access and offer integrations like Alexa and Google Assistant.

Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnels are great options that require more fuss to setup and maintain, but offer totally free and secure remote access.

What do you think? We would love to hear your feedback on our top remote access list. We will keep it updated over time as the services evolve and change!

ยท 3 min read
Quinn Damerell

Google Assistant Home Assistant with Homeway

Interested in using your Google Assistant to voice control your Home Assistant? Then you're in the right place! Setting up a Google Assistant integration with your Home Assistant allows you to control your lights, thermostats, TVs, alarms, and more with your voice or the Google Home app. It's magic! ๐Ÿง™

There are a few solutions to integrate Google Assistant with your Home Assistant. We will cover the top choices, see the pros and cons, and tell you how to set them up!

Homeway.ioโ€‹

Homeway is a community project with a mission to empower the Home Assistant community with free, secure, and private remote access to Home Assistant. Homeway also enables secure Amazon Alex and Google Assistant support for Home Assistant.

Homeway is very easy to set up. Just install the Home Assistant add-on and you're ready to go. The setup process takes less than 10 seconds; give it a try.

Prosโ€‹

  • $2.49 / month
  • Easy to set up
  • Lighting fast Google Assistant responses
  • Includes unlimited Home Assistant remote access.

Consโ€‹

  • No completely free options

Nabu Casaโ€‹

Nabu Casa supports Google Assistant when you sign up for their cloud service. The setup is easy: create an account, log into your Home Assistant, and enable the Google Assistant.

Prosโ€‹

  • Easy to set up
  • Fast Google Assistant responses
  • Includes remote access
  • Supports Home Assistant

Consโ€‹

  • $5.50 / month, which is more expensive than other options
  • No completely free options

Manual Google Assistant Setupโ€‹

If you already have remote access to your Home Assistant, you can manually set up your own Google Action to support the Google Assistant. The setup process requires quite a lot of work, creating Google developer accounts, making Google Cloud resources, and more. It's quite an involved process, but it might be a good fit for you if you're a techy.

Prosโ€‹

  • Free to set up and use

Consโ€‹

  • Complex setup
  • Requires maintenance to keep working
  • Requires existing remote access for Home Assistant

Summaryโ€‹

Since the Google Assistant requires a secure Internet facing endpoint, most services require a low monthly fee.

Homeway is our top pick. Offering low-cost, secure, and private connections to Google Assistant. On top of that, you also get unlimited remote access to Home Assistant.

Nabu Casa is also a solid option, but it costs more to use.

Manually creating and setting up a Google Action for Google Assistant is complicated, but if you can set up and maintain the action, it's totally free!

We hope you find this post useful. We will keep this blog post updated with any service changes or new options, so check back soon!