Smart Home Actions 2020 Update & Resources

Smart Home Actions 2020 — Updates & Resources

The Google Smart Home platform lets users control your connected devices through the Google Home app and Google Assistant, helping to create a helpful home for your users. As the Smart Home platform has continued to mature over the past year, we’ve created additional tools and resources to help you develop your own Smart Home Action — check them out below!

Enhanced Analytics and Logging

To help you monitor and log events within your Smart Home Action, Enhanced analytics and logging tools launched on June 30th. These pre-populated metrics charts are accessed directly through the Actions console, and leverage Google Cloud Monitoring features. Track device traits most commonly accessed by your users, latency for user query responses, success rates of user engagement, and compare interactions between cloud and local fulfillment. Additionally, log events provided through Google Cloud Logging help you debug your Smart Home Action quickly by accessing event logs that include information on the intent type, device type, fulfillment pathway, and the locale of the request.

These features will help you quickly identify issues within your Smart Home Action, and provide quality information to help guide continued development and improvements to your end-user experience.

Enhanced Analytics and Logging Videos:

• How to use error logs
• Enhanced Smart home Analytics

Local Home SDK

The Local Home SDK exited developer preview on April 6th, and version 1.0 was made publically available to all developers. Based on feedback from the developer preview, we added the ability to enter multiple scan configurations to the Actions console. Also the console now supports uploading Javascript bundles for your local fulfillment app.

Since the launch of 1.0, we’ve also added some additional features including Node.js runtime support to the Google Nest WiFi routers. This means the Local Home SDK is now compatible with the full Nest WiFi system. The Node.js on-device testing URL can be added to the console, also enabling you to use Chrome DevTools for inspecting and debugging Node.js apps. Other small fixes have also been added — you can find more information in the source code here.

By implementing the Local Home SDK within your fulfillment app, your Action can be more reliable during fulfillment of user requests by routing commands over the local area network, while still maintaining the cloud fulfillment path as backup.

Local Home SDK Samples:

• Smart Home Local

Local Home SDK Codelabs:

• Enable local fulfillment for smart home Actions

Smart Home Entertainment Devices (SHED)

Smart Home Entertainment Devices (SHED) types and traits — To support partners with entertainment focused devices, we launched multiple new entertainment device types, and media-related traits in April and July. These enable full voice control and engagement with entertainment devices within the home from any Assistant-enabled device. To see the complete list of supported traits and types, check out the reference documentation.

App Flip

To help ease the account-linking process for users to onboard with your Action, App Flip launched in July. This easy-to-develop feature simplifies the process for account linking via mobile, by enabling users to easily link their partner accounts to Google Assistant without having to manually log in again.

App Flip helps enhance your existing OAuth 2.0 server implementation, and you can easily utilize this feature within your Android or iOS app with a minimal amount of code updates.

Scheduled Smart Home Actions

Scheduled Smart Home Actions launched in November, which enables users to schedule device commands to trigger at a later time . This feature is supported for all Smart Home Actions, and does not require any additional development work. Currently, the traits `LightEffects`, `OnOff`, and `StartStop` support scheduling.

Light Effects Emulation

Another user-facing feature released in September was Gentle Wake/Sleep light effects. This enhancement enables users to slowly brighten or dim their lights, switches, and plugs over a preset time period. These device features are supported by default through the `LightEffects` trait. If your Smart Home Action currently only uses the `Brightness` trait, your end-users can still benefit from Gentle Wake/Sleep thanks to emulated light effects support. This feature also does not require any development work from your teams to be compatible with your Action.

General Platform Resources

Finally, we introduced several general resources to help you with your Smart Home Action development. In an effort to open Smart Home Action development to all programming languages, we released the Smart Home Schemas repository. This contains the JSON schemas that define the Google Smart Home platform. We have updated our documentation to reflect these schemas, ensuring better accuracy with full example intents in the device guides, and more detailed payload parameters within the traits’ references.

New Platform Videos:

• How to self-certify Smart Home Actions for the Google Assistant
• Account linking verification for smart home
• Inspecting Home Graph
• Test suite for smart home
• Offline handling for smart home

New Platform Blogs:

• Account Linking Verification for Smart Home
• Inspecting Home Graph
• Test Suite for Smart Home
• Handing Offline Devices

Great Learning Resources:

• Docs: goo.gle/assistant-smarthome-docs
• Samples: Samples and libraries | Actions on Google Smart Home
• Codelabs: All Smart Home Codelabs
• Playlist: Smart Home video Playlist

More Resources:

• Ask your technical questions on Stack Overflow
• Stay up-to-date with announcements by following us on Twitter
• Connect with other Assistant Developers on our Reddit community

Interested in Conversational Actions or App Actions? Check out their own blog with all new features and resources listed out at:

• Conversational Actions 2020 Updates & Resources
• App Actions 2020 Updates & Resources

Thanks for reading! To share your thoughts or questions, join us on Reddit at r/GoogleAssistantDev.

Follow @ActionsOnGoogle on Twitter for more of our team’s updates, and tweet using #AoGDevs to share what you’re working on. Can’t wait to see what you build!

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