Google Home API to control home devices

Question

Is it possible to trigger an action on a device without going through the Assistant ?

The use-case: I have a bunch of Lutron Caseta dimmers (they are great!) hooked up to Google Home and I'd like to have a motion detector open the lights. I'd rather build on Google Home than on the Lutron platform.

Is this possible ?

Answer 1

There is no Google Home API. When connecting your smart devices, you connect them through the Google Assistant. As such, controlling a device would have to go through the Assistant.

There are many ways to make the experience better, such as creating routines to run many actions at once.

With regards to your use-case, the Google Assistant doesn't support triggers for things like motion detection. What you could do is use the Google Assistant SDK to programmatically control the Assistant.

You could set up the motion sensor to execute a text query of "turn on the lights". It will be processed by the Assistant and execute as expected. The Node.js code sample shows how you can send these commands.