Recently at Google I/O, we gave you a sneak peek at our new Local Home SDK, a suite of local technologies to enhance your smart home integrations. Today, the SDK is live as a developer preview. We've been working hard testing the platform with our partners, including GE, LIFX, Philips Hue, TP-Link, and Wemo, and are excited to bring you these additional technologies for connecting smart devices to the Google Assistant.
Figure 1: The local execution path
This SDK enables developers to more deeply integrate their smart devices into the Assistant by building upon the existing Smart Home platform to create a local execution path via Google Home smart speakers and Nest smart displays. Developers can now run their business logic to control new and existing smart devices in JavaScript that executes on the smart speakers and displays, benefitting users with reduced latency and higher reliability.
The SDK introduces two new intents,
IDENTIFY and REACHABLE_DEVICES. The local
home platform scans the user's home network via mDNS, UDP, or UPnP to discover any smart
devices connected to the Assistant, and triggers IDENTIFY to verify
that the device IDs match those returned from the familiar Smart Home API
SYNC intent. If the detected device is a hub or bridge,
REACHABLE_DEVICES is triggered and treats the hub as the proxy device
for communicating locally. Once the local execution path from Google Home to a device is
established, the device properties are updated in Home
Graph.
Figure 2: The intents used for each execution path
When a user triggers a smart home Action that has a local execution path, the Assistant sends
the EXECUTE
intent to the Google Nest device rather than the developer's cloud fulfillment. The
developer's JavaScript app is invoked, which then triggers the Local Home SDK to send control
commands to the smart device over TCP, UDP socket, or HTTP/HTTPS requests. By defaulting to
local execution rather than the cloud, users experience faster fulfillment of their requests.
The execution requests can still be sent to the cloud path in case local execution fails. This
redundancy minimizes the possibility of a failed request, and improves the overall user
experience.
Additional features of the Local Home platform include:
Figure 3: Local Home configuration tool in the Actions console
JavaScript apps can be tested on-device, allowing developers to employ familiar tools like Chrome Developer Console for debugging. Because the Local Home SDK works with the existing smart home framework, you can self-certify new apps through the Test suite for smart home as well.
To learn more about the Local Home platform, check out the API reference, and get started adding local execution with the developer guide and samples. For general information covering how you can connect smart devices to the Google Assistant, visit the Smart Home documentation, or check out the Local Technologies for the Smart Home talk from Google I/O this year.
You can send us any feedback you have through the bug tracker, or engage with the community at /r/GoogleAssistantDev. You can tag your posts with the flair local-home-sdk to help organize discussion.
