Will Smart Home ever support passing spoken text to 3rd party, with custom responses?

[mrceolla]

Hi,

Conversational Actions were a great capability all around, but I made very heavy use of one of them for home automation purposes.  I could create any command, control any device, and get any response that I wanted.  It was the ultimate in flexibility and customization.  Your current Smart Home SDK doesn't allow for this.  Will it ever?  For example:

Hey Google, ask [system] [command]

Where [system] is the name of the Smart Home integration (HomeSeer, HomeAssistant, SmartThings, etc) and [command] is the text that is sent to the 3rd party system for processing.  The 3rd party system would then provide a response that Assistant would read out loud.  

Conversational Actions allowed for exactly this, and this capability very much needs to continue to exist in some form or fashion, or I believe you will lose many users.  The impending death of Conversational Actions has angered a lot of people.  Thousands of IFTTT, HomeAssistant, and other smart home enthusiasts are affected.  My hope is you can add something to the Smart Home SDK to fill this gap.  You will never be able to complete with the likes of HomeAssistant, HomeSeer, SmartThings or other home automation hubs, so please do not handicap them.  You are simply an accessory for them.

Note, my use case is for smart speakers and displays, so Android app actions is not a solution.

Regards,

Mike

[sipriyadarshi · Accepted solution]

• Hey Mike, we noted your ask here and will continue to monitor for other similar requests involving the Conversational Actions in our support channels. We do collect these requests, share with the teams involved in the planning process, and try to get them in our feature development timeline.
• Unfortunately there are no features readily available to replace the capability you mentioned above, but our teams are constantly working towards providing a better Google Smart Home Ecosystem. When we have any updates on these features, we will update our public documentation.

[mrceolla]

Thank you for your reply.

It is important to note that most of the asks, questions, and outrage over the Conversational Actions sunset are NOT located in Google Smart Home channels such as this one. They are in Action on Google, Assistant, Nest, and other categories more heavily. In Google forums, but more so on others like reddit, and StackOverflow. I don't know how closely knit the Google teams are, but please be aware the questions and outrage at the loss of this essential functionality are in many locations on the internet. Please take them all into consideration.

[mrceolla]

This was a terrible move.  I will be moving myself, customers, family, and friends to Echo devices.