Google and Philips Hue – Setup and Voice Commands

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In this post, we will look into the setup of Philips Hue for Google Home, Nest and Assistant. You’ll find all the voice commands, the gentle sleep and wake feature, and also examples how to group and automate your Philips Hue lights with Google Routines and Philips Hue Zones (beta).

The good news, some of the “overnight disappearing” bugs have been fixed, but some old bugs are enduring. And, unfortunately no progress with the Philips Hue Zones (beta) features, yet.

For tips and tricks on how to set up your Philips Hue lights, please see Philips Hue – A Smarter Setup for Your Smart Lights.

Estimated reading time: 20 minutes

How to prepare Philips Hue for Google Home?

Screenshot of Philips Hue App - Default Scenes of a Color Bulb
Philips Hue App – The Default Scenes of a Color Bulb – Delete what you don’t need!

Google Home will import all our Philips Hue lights, rooms and scenes. Before we get into the Google Home app setup, it’s a good time to delete all the scenes, which we don’t need.

Review your Philips Hue Scenes

  1. Open your Philips Hue app and go through every room and zone in your Home dashboard.
  2. Tap on the palette icon at the top right and you will see the scenes of your room.
  3. Philips provides 11 predefined scenes. Together with a “color loop” scene, you’ll find 12 scenes per room/zone later in the Google Home app.
  4. Make sure you delete the scenes you won’t need and create the ones you’d like to control with Google Home.

Create your Philips “My Hue” Account

screen shot of philips hue out of home control
Philips Hue – Out of Home Control – creating your “My Hue” account

A prerequisite for connecting Philips Hue to Google Home is the “My Hue” account. This account will connect to your Philips Hue bridge and enable the communication between the Google Home cloud and the Philips Hue cloud. In case you have not already, open your Philips Hue app and tap on Settings / “Out of home control” and then “Log in”. You can create your account there.

Philips Hue in the Google Home App

Screenshot of Google Home - Philips Hue Service
Google Home Philips Hue Service 
  1. Open your Google Home app and tap the “+” Add button at the Home page (top left).
  2. Tap “Set up device” then “Have something already set up” and search for “Hue”.
  3. When selecting Philips Hue we are guided to link our “My Hue” account to the Google Assistant.
  4. Enter your “My Hue” account and “Allow” Google to access your Philips Hue lights.

Let Google Home discover your Smart Home Devices

After allowing Google to access your “My Hue “account, it will take a minute time to discover your devices. All your lights, rooms, zones and scenes will be imported.

Bug-Note: You should see all your rooms and lights in the Google Home app dashboard, but the scenes might be missing (like in our case, appears to be an enduring bug).

Screenshot of Google Assistant - Home Control - Rooms
Google Assistant – Home Control – Rooms Overview

For a better overview, we can switch to the “Rooms” view under Home / Settings / More Settings / Assistant / Home control and review and adapt what has been imported.

Please note, Philips has added support for “Zones” in the Philips Hue app. This is an additional layer, which allows us to group the lights of multiple rooms (like downstairs, upstairs) or areas within a room (dining, couch, etc.). Each of the Philips Hue “Zones” supports Hue scenes and only those are currently imported into Google Home.
Philips Hue Zones are still beta and not yet ready for Google. We’ll highlight quite some bugs for this feature, let’s hope they will get fixed soon.

It depends on the complexity of your setup, but you might need to correct the scene to room mapping in the Scenes tab. For this, tap on a scene and map it to the right room.

Google Home is “room aware”, which means we can omit the room name in our commands. Make sure your Google Home is assigned to the right room in the Google Home app: From Home click on Settings / Local devices / select your Google Home device / Room and assign it to where it is located. You will find more information on that in the command section below, as this basically affects all commands.

Basic Voice Commands for Philips Hue

And, here are the voice commands we can use with Google to control our Philips Hue lights:

Voice Commands for turning Philips Hue lights On / Off

  • Ok Google, lights (on)
  • Hey Google, let there be light!
  • Hey Google, lights off
  • Ok Google, turn couch on
  • Hey Google, make the Go lamp in the Dining room go off

The shortest command to turn on the lights in the room where your Google Home is located, is to say “Hey Google, lights!“. And, for Harry Potter fans out there: “Hey Google, lumos!” and “Hey Google, nox!” will also work.

Google was a bit talkative in the old days, when confirming voice commands for lights. There’s now a new feature, where Google confirms the “light commands” of a room it’s mapped to, only with a chime.

Note, if you want to control other rooms, just add the room name. Or if you want to control all lights use “all lights” in the command.

Pro-Tip – Google understands many alternatives for these commands, just pick what works best for you:
OK Google, switch / change / make / set / turn / activate / deactivate (on/off)
[all/my, (the) <LIGHTNAME> / (the) <ROOMNAME> / (the <LIGHTNAME> in/at (the) <ROOMNAME> (light(s))/(lamp(s)) (go) (on/off).

Another Pro-Tip: Light names are an additional (rather implicit) way to group lights in Google Home. If you name your lights e.g. “Ceiling 1”, “Ceiling 2”, etc. You can refer to all your ceiling lights by saying: “Ok Google, turn on the ceiling lights”.

Bug-Note:
Currently, Zones are not recognized as (virtual) “devices” and cannot be turned on/off.

Google Home in the bookshelf
Google Home reading the interview of his fathers. Philips Hue Lightstrips, glued to the back of the shelf, are his favorite Reading Light.

Voice Commands for setting Philips Hue Scenes

  • Ok Google, activate concentrate
  • Hey Google, activate relax couch

We can omit the room name and Google will activate only the scenes in the room he’s in, if you want to set the scene of another room, just add the room name.

Pro-Tip: We couldn’t find robust alternatives here, maybe you’re luckier, let me know!
OK Google, activate <SCENENAME> (in) (<ROOMNAME>)

Bug-Note – The default Philips Hue “Nightlight” cannot be activated and instead just turns the lights on. As workaround, you’d need to give the “Nightlight” scenes “night light” nick-names (space in between!).

Voice Commands for setting the Philips Hue Brightness

  • Ok Google, dim the lights
  • Hey Google, bedroom 10
  • Ok Google, brighten the Kitchen 3 light by 30 percent

If you omit the room name, try to throw in “lights”, and you will control the brightness of the room Google Home is assigned to. Ok, here’s another one for Harry Potter fans: “Hey Google, lumos maxima!“.

Pro-Tip: In case you want to play with alternatives, you can pick from here:
– OK Google, (make / change / set / turn) ((the) brightness of)

[all/my, (the) <LIGHTNAME> / (the) <ROOMNAME> / (the) <LIGHTNAME> in/at (the) <ROOMNAME>] (light(s))/(lamp(s)) (brightness)
to x (percent) / darker / brighter / less bright
– OK Google, dim / brighten

[ all/my, <LIGHTNAME> / <ROOMNAME>] (light(s)) / (lamp(s))
(by x (percent))

Another Pro-Tip: If you are interested in the concepts behind a Google smart home action, check out this Google Developers YouTube clip: Programming your home automation with the Google Assistant (Behind the Actions), and yes, Daniel’s example of “dimming the lights just a little bit”, does work now. Dimming is 15 percent, a little bit dimming is 10 percent.

Bug-Note: Currently, we cannot set the brightness of Zones.

Voice Commands for setting Philips Hue Colors

  • Ok Google, change the lights to “Air Force blue”
  • Hey Google, turn the kitchen to “school bus yellow”

If you omit the room name, you will control the color of the lights in the room Google Home is mapped to.

Pro-Tip: Here are some alternatives
OK Google, switch / change / make / set / turn
[all/my, (the) <LIGHTNAME> / (the) <ROOMNAME> / (the) <LIGHTNAME> in/at (the) <ROOMNAME>] (light(s)) / (lamp(s))
(to (the color)) <COLOR-NAME>

Note: COLOR-NAME is not documented, but many of the color-names here are supported.

Bug-Note: Currently, we cannot set the Color of Zones.

Voice Commands for setting Philips Hue Color Temperature

Though Alexa-like commands (“make the lights cooler/warmer”) do not work yet, we can set the Kelvin for our lights. Lee, thanks a lot for the feedback!

  • Ok Google, set the office lights to 4732 Kelvin

The range is between 2000 and 6500 K, and we can apply this to individual lights or rooms:

Pro-Tip: You can pick what works best for you from these alternatives
OK Google, change / make / set / turn
[all/my, (the) <LIGHTNAME> / (the) <ROOMNAME> / (the) <LIGHTNAME> in/at (the) <ROOMNAME>] (light(s)) / (lamp(s))
(to) <2000-6500> K/Kelvin(s)

Bug-Note: Currently, we cannot set the Kelvin of Zones.

How to Synchronize Multiple Scenes (and play some Music)

What are Google Routines?

If you are completely new to Google Routines, you might enjoy this overview — Google Routines: How to Automate your Life with Google Assistant! Here’s Google, explaining and creating his routines (rewind for the full cartoon):

Routine(s) to set the Scene in one Room

We can create Google Routines to control multiple smart home devices in one room or even multiple rooms. Let’s start with one room.

Let’s assume, you have set up some Philips Hue lights in your office and you’d like to concentrate, which means:

  • setting your Philips Hue and other lights to the right scene,
  • turning the air washer on for some clean air,
  • setting the temperature to not too cozy and
  • playing some background music which, supports editing this post.

Here we go:

  1. In the Google Home app, tap on “Routines”,
  2. Scroll down and tap “Manage Routines”
  3. Tap the blue “+” button at the bottom right corner to create a new routine
  4. Tap on “Add commands (required)”,
  5. Choose your voice command (here, “Office concentrate”)
  6. Tap “Add Action”,
    • tap “popular actions”,
    • check “Adjust scenes” and then
    • tap on its settings icon.
    • Select the scenes from the scenes list (here it’s “[Office] concentrate” from Philips Hue and “Muks concentrate” from Nanoleaf).
    • Tap back on the top left (please only once, otherwise your work is gone!) and
    • Don’t forget to click on “Add” top right!
  7. Now, that we have seen how delicate our Google Home app currently is, we’ll practice with the remaining actions:
    • add an action from popular actions to control your smart plugs (here the air washer)
    • add an action from popular actions to control your smart thermostat
    • Under “And then play …” select Music and tap the configuration icon
    • Type in your favorite music for concentration (here “Deep Focus”)
    • Tap back on the top left (please only once, otherwise your work is gone!)
  8. Please don’t forget to tap the “Save” at the top right!

Now we can say:

  • “Hey Google, Office concentrate” 

and our Philips Hue scenes take part in many actions performed with only one voice command. If you’re not tired yet, you can create your routines for e.g. “reading”, “relaxing”, etc.

Routines to set the Scenes of Multiple “Rooms”

Note: If you only have Philips Hue lights, the need for this workaround, might disappear once the Philips Hue “Zones” are out of “beta” and the bugs above fixed! Once this feature is stable, it makes much more sense to create Zones and their Scenes in the Philips Hue app and have them imported into Google Home.

Let’s assume, we have a dining area, an entertainment area, an open kitchen area, etc., all of them part of our living room. Let’s further assume, we have these areas configured as rooms in the Philips Hue app because we want to control them independently. We want to relax on the couch, while someone is reading at the dining table and someone else is concentrating in the kitchen area to get the recipe right.

We can already control existing scenes with the command:

  • OK Google, activate <scene> (in) <room>

But, how to set the scene for all the lights (and areas) in our living room area with only one voice command? We are looking for something like “living room relax” and all our areas set the right scene.

We just need to create more Routines:

Screenshot of Google Home App Routine Living room relax
Google Home App – Routine: Living Room Relax
  1. In the Google Home app, tap on “Routines”,
  2. Scroll down and tap “Manage Routines”
  3. Tap the blue “+” button in the bottom right corner to create a new routine
  4. Tap on “Add commands (required)”,
  5. Choose your voice command (here, “Living room relax”)
  6. Tap “Add Action”,
    • tap “popular actions”,
    • check “Adjust scenes” and then
    • tap on the settings icon next to it.
    • Select the scenes from the scenes list (here it’s “Couch relax”, “Table relax”, “Kitchen relax”, etc.).
    • Tap back on the top left (please only once, otherwise your work is gone!) and
    • Don’t forget to tap “Add” on the top right!
  7. Please don’t forget to “Save” at the top right!

Pro-Tip: No, we can’t call routines from routines, yet.

How to Schedule Routines

Screenshot of Living Room Relax Group Routine
Living Room Relax triggers Multiple Scenes and can be scheduled.

One of the nice features of Google Home is that we can schedule all the routines which we have already created. Just go into your “Manage Routines” section, tap on a routine and select weekday and time.

You could schedule the “Living Room Relax” scene at 6:00 pm and the “Living Room Nightlight” scene around 9 pm every weekday.

Note, to dim/brighten your Philips Hue lights gradually with Google Home, even in a Google Routine, check out the new Gentle Sleep and Wake “Schedules” feature below. You can additionally configure Sunrise/Sunset schedules in the Philips Hue or a third party app.

Pro-Tip: No, we can’t gradually change the brightness with one command in Routines, where we control brightness and duration, yet.

Updating your Philips Hue Scenes

Assuming you have configured everything in the Philips Hue app and you don’t see the changes automatically synchronized to the Google Home app, you can either try:

“Hey Google, sync my lights” or “Hey Google, sync Philips Hue”

As mentioned above, there is currently a bug in the Google Home app, which might not display updates on the Home page. Home / Settings / More Settings / Assistant / Home control / Rooms always displays the truth.

And in case this does not help (like in our case, it seems there’s currently a bug), you will need to unlink and re-link the Philips Hue service: Open your Google Home app and tap the “+” Add button in the Home page. Tap “Set up device” then “Have something already set up”. Tap on Philips Hue / Unlink and repeat the linking steps from above. It’s not very intuitive, we agree.

Bug-Note: In case you see your devices duplicated in the Google Home app, force-quitting the app and relaunching, usually fixes it.

Gentle Sleep and Wake

Google Home supports a wonderful new feature for our Philips Hue lights. We’ve already examined some time ago in our post Sleeping Better with Smart Lighting: Smarter Go to Bed and Wake Up, that smart lighting can help us to go to bed and wake up more refreshed.

Illustration of Google Home - Gentle Sleep and Wake
Springtime Fatigue? Google Home falling gently asleep with his Philips Hue lights …

As light is deeply connected to our body-clock, reducing our exposure to light for at least half an hour before going to bed will make us feel tired. Increasing light in the morning will make us feel more energized for the day.

This is exactly what this feature does. It will gradually dim or brighten your Philips Hue lights over the course of 30 minutes.

Gentle Wake Voice Commands

  • Ok Google, turn on gentle wake up (Please note, you need to activate this feature on the device you set your alarms on!)
  • Ok Google, wake up my lights in the (room) at (time)
  • Ok Google, wake up my lights (Note, this will start the brightening process immediately and could be used in scheduled routines) 

Gentle Sleep Voice Commands

  • Hey Google, sleep the lights in the (room) at (time)
  • Ok Google, sleep my lights (Note, this will start the dimming process immediately and could be used in scheduled routines) 

Multiple Philips Hue Bridges

Before we look into how to install multiple Hue bridges, there’s a concept we need to become familiar with:

Household Members

Google supports inviting your family to your household (through “Add…”/”household member”), so that every household member:

  • sees all smart home devices in their apps,
  • can create their own individual routines which can combine many actions into one personalized voice command,
  • can link their personal music and video service to improve personal recommendations.

Please note, that you are basically sharing administrator rights, meaning any household member can change and break everything in your smart home setup.

How can we integrate multiple Hue Bridges? 

There’s a trick with household members, which we’ve learned from Jason in our post Logitech Harmony and Google Home: New Setup and Voice Commands: invited family members can share their smart home devices. Thanks, Jason!

Pro-Tip: You can, of course, create multiple Google accounts and switch between them to “simulate” multiple household members. 

Here’s a step by step:

  1. Invite your household member from your own smartphone/account, the invitation will appear pending in the other accounts Google Home app settings.
  2. On the household members device/account, accept the invitation (from your mail inbox or Google Home app) and you can see the full household smart home setup shared, including the first Hue Bridge lights.
  3. Add the Philips Hue Service on the household members smartphone/account (same process as described above).
  4. When you get to the point to select your “My Hue” account, select the account of your other bridge(s). Note, if you are working on one smartphone, your login from the first bridge might be cashed. Tap the tiny “Sign out” (top right) on the Philips Hue login page to be able to enter the account of this bridge.
  5. Google might ask you now to map your devices – one by one – to the shared homes rooms. In case you have a couple, cancel this and go to “Home / Settings / More Settings / Assistant / Home control / Rooms”. Spot the devices without a home and map them to your shared home.
  6. After successful configuration, you should see the lights of all Hue bridges on all devices/accounts.

Multiple Languages for Philips Hue

Screenshot of Google Assistant - Supported Languages 1
Google Assistant – Supported Languages Page 1/2

Google Home supports setting a second Google Assistant language. If you do not see the option (under “Google Home / Settings / More Settings / Assistant / Languages” or “Google Assistant / Settings / Assistant / Languages”, you could try setting your smartphone region and language to English US and re-download the Google Home / Google Assistant apps from the U.S. stores.

Screenshot of Google Assistant - Supported Languages 2
Google Assistant – Supported Languages page 2/2

This has the advantage, that you can access almost all U.S. features/services and actions, plus select any two languages from the currently supported: Danish, Dutch, English (Australia, Canada, U.K., Indonesia, Ireland, India, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand), French (France and Canada), German (Germany and Austria), Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Peru, U.S.) and Swedish.

We’ve tested a bilingual English/German setup with the German commands in the comment section below and it works.

Pro-Tip: For a bilingual setup with multiple Hue Bridges, all Google Assistant accounts need to have the same language settings and you might need to power cycle your Google Homes. The Google Nest Hub supports English (U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, Singapore), Dutch, Danish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish (Spain), Swedish and Norwegian.

Conclusion

Philips Hue and Google have impressively extended their integration over the years: rooms, scenes and room awareness. Bilingual support with this extensive language-set is an impressive feature, not only for bilingual households.

The Gentle Sleep & Wake feature is a pleasant surprise, as it offers us voice commands to adapt our lighting to our sleep schedule, which we can also integrate into our scheduled Google Home Routines.

Remember the overnight disappearing bugs, they are – hopefully – gone. During retest, we didn’t see different numbers of lights on screen devices and voice confirmations, or Google coming back with: “activating two scenes”.

Illustration Google Home Philips Hue Bugs
Bugs, which disappear overnight? How was that possible?

The Philips Hue “Zone” beta support, shows no progress, since our last update in May. Zone scenes can already be set, control for on/off, color, dimming and color temperature is still missing. Though Google has updated their Google Home app user interface recently, the configuration options still don’t feel intuitive, but maybe that’s just us.

Apart from that, Google and Philips Hue provide a good integration!

Please note, that Google features are released in iterations. If your Google Home does not support some features yet, hang in, they will come!

If you have any questions or just want to share your ideas and experiences with Philips Hue and Google Assistant, please leave a comment below! You can subscribe to the comment section to receive notifications about updates.

More Information

smartenlight

You can find more Google Home posts here: Google Assistant.

If you are interested in smart ideas for your smart lighting, check out:

Knock-knock … Enjoy our Google Joke Animations and Alexa Song Remixes (featuring Google) on YouTube!

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32 thoughts on “Google and Philips Hue – Setup and Voice Commands”

    • Thanks for the heads-up! These linking issues are an intermittent problem with Google and Hue. Seems to be working now for the folks in the thread. Will add a warning in the post in the next update.

      Reply
  1. Thanks a lot for your guide, it was helpful! However, I seem to not be able to add the second hue bridge to Ghome. I have done all the steps with two different accounts (my girlfriends account and a shared account we use for calendar apointments). I have even set up Ghome on my girlfriends’ phone and linked Philips Hue to Bridge two and gave the permissions,.. I saw the lights of bridge 2 in the Ghome app. I then sent an invite from my Ghome (with all the lights of bridge 1 and sonos speakers) to her account, which I accepted (funny enough it says in the heading that I have removed her from Ghome, but the invite itself states I have invited her and she accepts). It goes on for some time to link up and then is linked, I can also see this in my Ghome, but she, nor I, can see the lights from Bridge 2 anymore. Both of us, only see Bridge 1 lights. Any idea how to solve this?

    Reply
  2. Full Update & Retest:
    – initial (overnight disappearing) bugs seem fixed
    – added some enduring bugs and workarounds where possible
    – Hue Zones still not fully working
    Postdate updated.

    Reply
  3. Added paragraph for the new ‘chime’ confirmation: “Google was quite talkative, when confirming voice commands for lights. We now have a new feature, where Google confirms the light commands of a room it’s mapped to, only with a chime. A separate feature to control Google’s voice volume independent of the speakers volume has been introduced in the EQ settings, but is not functional yet.”

    Reply
  4. Updated the Google Nest Hub supported languages: “The Google Nest Hub supports English (U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, India, Singapore), Dutch, Danish, French, German, Indian, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish (Spain), Swedish and Norwegian.”

    Reply
  5. I was interested in the multiple hue bridges approach so tried that. I setup one bridge (bridge one) on the main account, and the other bridge (bridge two) on another account. I then added Hue as a device for the main account. Invited the other account to join the home. I then added the hue account of the second account (bridge two). While I was able to see all the rooms and lights from both bridges, I was unable to turn on lights using google home, I would just get an … oppps error message. I tried doing the setup a couple of times but the same result. I tried using both the main account, and the second account in google home, but same issues. Can you give a more detailed instruction in case I missed something or messed something up??

    Reply
    • Your steps are correct! Hue and Google are having issues currently: TWITTER maybe this problem relates to yours, but it’s working here, just tested.
      If you have Voice Match set up you might trigger another account? (Under GH / account / local devices / speaker / settings you should see the linked accounts of your GH and it should be the accounts you used for Hue setup)

      Reply
    • Hope this helps!
      “UPDATE: The issue with Google Assistant is resolved! Please have a try, and many thanks for your patience” TWITTER

      Reply
  6. BIG Update! Added Google Routines & Automations, Philips Hue Zones (beta) and all the bugs we observed during testing (in our clean test setup, so your mileage may vary). Also added some info on how Google Smart Home Actions work behind the scenes and what the future might bring for Google Assistant and Philips Hue, according to the announcements at Google I/O 2019.

    Reply
  7. Hi, I have completed all these steps at least 3 times and my google home continues to indicate that this has not been setup and you can do that in the google home app. I have logged into my phillips hue account in the hue app “out of home control.” I have added phillips hue with my google home app and also notice that it shows my living room lamp (only setup one bulb in living room) with a light bulb symbol beside it, but also has other icons with a theme name and underneath it says living room. I’m perplexed as I didn’t add any themes nor can I remove them. The icon associated with these themes looks like a movie producer “clapboard” for when they say action. Any assistance getting it to work with google home would be much appreciated.
    Thanks
    Lou

    Reply
    • It’s me replying to my own issues…so for some unknown reason, google assistant decided to turn my lamp on using my command. It also change the colour for me, then when I asked for daylight, it told me something went wrong…try again in a few minutes. I waited, then asked for daylight and it changed. Today, I setup a new bulb…google doesn’t even see it….yet. So maybe it needed some time to synch? Who knows. I’ve had enough for one weekend.
      Thanks for listening and allowing me to post on your site.
      Lou

      Reply
      • Hi Lou!
        1) As Google saves all your requests, you could check here what Google Home actually understands when you say a command: activitycontrols
        2) Make sure to make any changes in the Philips Hue app. After that you can say “Ok Google, synchronize Philips Hue!” Google will say “Sure, synching devices for Philips Hue”. Give it a minute to see your changes in the Google Home app.
        3) A stronger command for synchronizing all smart home devices is “Ok Google, synchronize devices!”. And if all these commands do not work for you, you’d need to unlink and re-link the Philips Hue service in the Google Home app to update the changes.
        4) Around Christmas there was an outage of the Philips Hue servers (which connect the lights to Google Home) for a couple of days, related to the many activations of new users. It is still a fragile integration, and you might have to unlink/re-link a couple of times to get it working.
        Hope this helps!

        Reply
    • Hi Lou! Yes, there are default scenes by Philips (like energize, concentrate, relax, nightlight, etc) which are automatically created for every room. These scenes are automatically imported into Google Home when linking. If you want to remove these scenes, you’d need to remove them in the Philips Hue app first.
      Hope this helps!

      Reply
  8. Google assistance supports secondary language, but how can I add names for the secondary for the hue lights/rooms/ etc. ?
    Eks. In Hue I have a “Kitchen”. In Danish, kitchen is ” Køkken”. So now I have to speak in Danish and then mix with the English word “kitchen”.

    /Phong

    Reply
    • This is unfortunately not possible. I could imagine, that Google might be able to automatically translate common e.g. room names for the supported languages in the future, but until then it’s just like “human” names, the same name in every language. A future workaround might be possible by creating custom routines in Danish, which execute the English names. Routines are as of now only available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian. Korean, Japanese. Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, still to come …

      Reply
  9. Here are some German Commands tested with English/German bilingual setup:

    AN/AUS
    Beispiele:
    – Licht aus
    – Schalte die Schreibtischlampe im Office ein
    – Licht ausmachen
    Alternativen:
    – OK Google, ( schalt(e) / stell(e) / mach(e) ) (die/das/alle Lampe(n) /Licht(er) / [LAMPENNAME] / (in/im/auf/am) [RAUMNAME] an/ein/aus/ab.
    – OK Google, (die/das/alle Lampen/Licht(er) / [LAMPENNAME]
) / ((in/im/auf/am) [RAUMNAME]) an/ein/aus/ab – schalten/machen/stellen.

    HELLIGKEIT
    Beispiele:
    – Licht auf 50
    – Stell die Schreibtischlampe im Office um 20% heller
    – Dimme Schreibtischlampe
    Alternativen
    – OK Google, dimme / stell(e) / mach(e) alle Lampen / Lichter
 (viel/noch) dunkler/heller.
    – OK Google, dimm(e) / stell(e) / mach(e) (die/das/alle Lampen) / Licht(er) / [LAMPENNAME])
 / (in/im/auf/am) [RAUMNAME] auf x Prozent / um x (Prozent) heller/dunkler / dunkler/heller

    FARBEN
    Beispiele:
    – Office grün
    – Ändere die Schreibtischlampe auf Blau

    Alternativen:
    – OK Google, änder(e) / stell(e) / mach(e) (die/das/alle Lampen / Licht(er) / [LAMPENNAME]
) / (in/im/auf/am) [RAUMNAME] (zu/auf) [FARBE].
    SZENEN/Ambiente:
    Beispiele:
    – Office Lesen
    – Aktiviere Office Konzentration
    Alternativen:
    – Hey Siri, (setz(e) / stell(e) / aktiviere) [LICHTSZENE].

    Farbtemperatur/Kelvin scheinen noch nicht zu funktioneren.
    Have fun!

    Reply
  10. The color temperature can be set now for Philips Hue. You can say: “Set the to 2000 (K/Kelvin optional, although saying K can prevent it from setting the brightness if it misunderstands)”. On my system, there seems to be a bug when you say 2700, where it responds it doesn’t know how to do that, but 2600 and 2800 work fine.

    Reply
    • Thanks a lot! Great input! I am including your voice command in the post. The range seems to be between 2000 K and 6500K, in 1K increments.

      Reply
  11. hi dude
    thanks for the guide.. it helped me on a couple of things.. i am still strugelling on a problem, i have a new setup made of philips hue bulbs, lightstrips and couple of lamps, google see every light like if the are 2 in total…, if i say switch off kitchen light and i have 1 light, it answers ok i switch off 2 lights, and the same for every room, always the double, if i say switch off all lights, it answers ok i switch off 18 lights and i have 9 total…
    wtf is happening ?? thank you !

    thank you !

    Reply
    • Thanks Alex! This is a tough one. If you have some additional Hub like SmartThings, it could duplicate your devices. Let’s assume you don’t use SmartThings. I’d start with “Hey Google, synch devices” which should synchronize what you have configured in the Philips Hue app over to Google Home. If this does not help, check what’s listed under “Home Control” devices. You should see the lights and scenes from your Hue app. If for whatever reason you see duplicates there, I’d try to unlink and link the service. Also, I observed that the responses from Google are sometimes flakey, eg it sometimes responds 3 or 5, for 4 lights in my office. (It of course works properly now, that I am trying it, LOL). Let us know, how it goes! Quite some people are reading this and maybe someone who had a similar issue and could fix it can help.

      Reply
      • Hi
        Thanks a lot Kresimir, i already checked everything and all is good, no double devices etc anywhere, i also started from scratch with the google home/assistant, but the problem still here, the sync philips hue command works but i think it’s placebo, usually it does nothing, i need to unlink and relink the account to get changes.. for example when i create a new scene i don’t get it synched with that command only by unlking and relinking.
        (i don’t use smarthings).
        i’ll make some more tries and keep you posted..

        thanks again for now

        Reply
        • Hi Alex!
          Just updated the post with new screenshots and procedures. I found that there is currently a bug in the Google Home app, which might not display updates in the Home page (the placebo you mentioned).
          Home / Settings / More Settings / Assistant / Home control / Rooms always displays the truth.
          Hope this helps!

          Reply
          • hi dude

            thanks for the info, my problem with numbers of lights.. has been (don’t know when exactly) been solved, with latest updates.. there’s a new change or may be a partial bug.. should be useful for you to know if you don’t know yet, you can’t sync anymore with the command ” sync Philips hue” , for the same result you have to say sync “home” or sync and the name of the room. however this will sync all connected devices/services not just Philips hue.

            Reply
    • Hey! Unfortunately not with on board features. Strobe was initially part of the Hue API but got removed, so 3rd party apps can only simulate something similar. As for animated scenes, I’d recommend checking out the “living scenes” in the Philips Hue Explore/Hue Labs section. Alexa automatically creates a color loop scene for every room, which seems not to be the case for Google Home, but you could workaround with 3rd party apps/services (eg IFTTT). Also I’d recommend checking the Philips Hue Sync apps for animations in synch with music/video on your desktop.

      Reply
    • Hi, Colorloop is now available for Google Home! Try: “Activate colorloop in room”. In case it does not work, try: “Hey Google, synch devices!” to synchronize your Philips Hue app settings to Google. Have fun!

      Reply
  12. I am looking to set up a Philips hue smart home with Google Home. I have a couple florescent tube style lights in my kitchen and bathroom. Can’t use Hue for those… So I was considering getting a smart switch for those rooms that is compatible with Home. How would this work? If I’m setting up scenes directly Hue, and then it’s syncing to Google Home, then how can I create scenes and rooms for my home that include these flourescents? Can I create additional rooms in Google Home that weren’t created in Hue?

    Also, what smart switches do people recommend? Don’t need dimming because it’s flourescents. Do I need to buy an additional hub on top of the hue hub for these smart switches (would like to avoid that). Thank you!

    Reply
    • Apologies for overlooking your post, hope this still helps! You could integrate smart plugs on zigbee level with the Philips Hue bridge. This is however a bit flaky as you are mixing different vendors on the Hue bridge. You could also integrate the smart plugs on Google Home level (WiFi plugs) and then create Google Home routines which trigger the Philips Hue scenes and set the on/off state of the smart plug. If you check the “popular actions” in the Google Home Routines, you will find “Adjust lights, plugs and more” and “Adjust scenes”. You can combine those two to create custom routines and specify your own commands. I cannot recommend specific smart plugs, as I’ve only tested WeMo and Eve (HomeKit only) up to now. Androidcentral has a pragmatic Google Home smart plug list here https://www.androidcentral.com/best-smart-plugs-google-home?utm_source=ac_fb&utm_medium=fb_link&utm_content=68702&utm_campaign=social

      Reply
  13. Google Home is finally room-aware, which helps making our commands shorter! =)
    I have updated this post with the changes.

    Cheers,
    Kay

    Reply
  14. Hey!
    After waiting for about a month to get the linking fixed, I could finally update the article with the new scene support. Thanks Google, finally!
    You can subscribe for notifications about updates through the link below.
    Have fun!
    Kay

    Reply

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