The Google Smart Home platform lets users control your commercially available connected devices through the Google Home app (GHA) and Google Assistant, which is available on more than 1 billion devices like smart speakers, phones, cars, TVs, headphones, watches, and more.
Why build
The benefits to you include deepening user engagement, driving sales of your devices and growing your brand value.
- Deepen user engagement — Reach users across 1 billion Assistant devices, improve discoverability, and remove friction from set-up.
- Drive sales — Become discoverable on Shopping on Search, increase eligibility to be featured across retail, installer channels.
- Grow brand value — Be at the center of the helpful home. Enable users to know your brand due to reliability and rich features.
How to build
To connect your device with Assistant, you need to build a smart home Action. Assistant handles how users trigger your Action (in multiple languages) and provides you with useful metadata through Google Home Graph (such as the state of a specific device based on the user's room). All you need to do is respond to the requests through your fulfillment service.
The easiest way to get started is by going through our codelabs. We recommend doing both of these codelabs, which walk you through portions of the development process, step-by-step:
After that, check our list of supported devices to ensure that what you plan to integrate is supported in the Google Home ecosystem. Then read through the Developer Checklist to understand the entire development flow from project creation to launch.
Supported Devices Developer Checklist
Google Home Playground
Use Google Home Playground to simulate a smart home project with your device types and traits. Create virtual devices, modify the device attributes and states, and more. See the Google Home Playground page for more details.
Debugging and analytics
If you've already built a smart home action and need to:
- Debug your action, go to the Debugging the smart home codelab.
- Access logs or create log-based metrics, go to the Log-based metrics for smart home codelab.
- Set up alerts to monitor outages, go to the Monitoring outages for smart home codelab.
Definitions
The following terms are used throughout this documentation:
- Authentication
- Links your users' Google accounts with user accounts in your authentication system.
- Device trait
- Device traits define the capabilities of a device type.
- Device type
- Let Assistant know what grammar should be used with your device.
- Fulfillment
- A service that handles a smart home intent and carries out the corresponding Action.
- Google smart home
- A platform that lets you create a smart home Action to extend the functionality of the Assistant to control connected devices.
- Home Graph
- A database that stores and provides contextual data about the home and its devices.
- smart home intents
- Simple messaging objects that describe how to perform a smart home Action such as turn on a light or cast audio to a speaker.