As you may have figured out by now, Google Home doesn’t support Philip Hue Scenes. With Google Home you can turn on/off, dim, brighten and change the color of your Hue lights. That’s it, for now. HOWEVER, there is a workaround and if you’re not familiar with IFTTT, you need to be.
Adding Hue Scene Control with Google Assistant (IFTTT)
First thing you need to do is connect your accounts with IFTTT. In IFTTT, here are the two you’re looking for:
- Philips Hue – When you land on the Hue service, you should see an option to connect.
- Google Assistant – This will allow you to use voice commands to control other services within IFTTT – in this example, Hue.
Now that your accounts are connected to IFTTT, it’s time to create an applet which will be the recipe for what you want to accoumplish.
- Select ‘new applet’ from the drop-down under your account info (top right), or click on the ‘+’ sign on your ‘my applets’ page if using your phone.
- Now you’ll be on the ‘if this’ page. This is the trigger of the action. In our case, it’s the voice command you’ll tell Google Home when you want to change a scene. Note: you’ll have to create new applets for every scene you want to be able to control with your voice.
- Click on ‘+ this’ and search for and choose Google Assistant
- Choose the trigger ‘say a simple phrase’ from the Google Assistant Trigger page.
- You’re now going to define up to 3 different phrases you want Google Assistant to recognize that will then trigger an event. You’ll also define what Google Home says back to you in response.
- Next, tell IFTTT what to do after you’ve created the Google Assistant Trigger. So, after you’ve clicked on ‘create trigger’ it’s time to select ‘+ that’ and search for Hue.
- On the Hue options page, select ‘set a scene in the room.’
- Now you’ll set the scene you want to activate. These will be the scenes you previously setup in your Hue app.
- Don’t forget to hit the finish button on the next page.
You’re all set – create as many of these applets as you want for various scenes and you’re good to go. It won’t be quite as responsive as the direct Google Home to Hue commands since it has to run through IFTTT, but it should respond withing 2-4 seconds.
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