If you are frustrated with Alexa and are thinking Google

The problem

Alexa has not been talking to Homeseer for most of the last 3 days so I started beefing up my backup controls since opening an app or web browser reduces the usefulness of the non automatic stuff a good bit. I already had a 4 button remote set up for the 4 main voice routines ("Good morning", "Bed time", "Good night" and "Away"). I also have four voice routines backed up with Echo Buttons for things like returning to streaming video from a security camera event, telling selected streamer to start next episode, reset room etc, that I also wanted to work while Alexa is in a mood. So I set up spare 4 button remote to backup those. That was a whole side adventure of its own.

As a "quick" before I did this.

About mid day I tried to add a 4 button remote to back stop my 4 Echo buttons. I found the Z-Net the house (other 3 were fine) was showing as not responding despite clearing being up. Just decided to reboot and found the OS had undone my rollback for the update the causes the system to constantly crash and reboot. (I had been avoiding the Win 7 to Win 10 upgrade till I had time). So had to rollback again. Then decided to make the time to do the upgrade to Win 10. Got that done and port 80 was blocked even though nothing was running on it. The usual stuff did not sort it. Finally found the registry entry to change to sort that, got remote added, labeled and linked to Alexa events just in time for bed so the Google update had to wait till the next day.

On to updating Google Home

First the virtual devices I use to trigger events

One point to start. Google like Alexa only sees a small subset of the devices Homeseer does. In Google's case it only sees 84 total smart devices. Homeseer alone shows 3227 "devices".  Granted in Homeseer a lot of those are multiple data streams on single actual physical device.

Last I counted Alexa saw 348 so still quite a few more than Google.

Adding devices looks simple. But the first issue was just finding them. New stuff is getting dumped at the bottom in a "Linked to you" labeled (no room) section with the full name, starting with location 1 and location 2 making it REAL tough to tell them apart.

So the first thing you need to do is rename them and assign them to a room. Even that proved oddly more difficult than it should be. For example.

When you try and edit it, the name gets truncated.

After retyping the whole name just to get the locations removed you want to put it in a "room" so you can find it easier so you tap add to room and you get to this page. I toyed with the idea here of moving all the shop and barn devices to a separate "homes" but figured but not to add complexity.

Clicking next gets you here, which to me is confusing. All you can do is tap move or quit so I tapped move.

That gets me to where I expected to be.

Note I had added an "Alexa" custom room earlier.

Now this looks better.

Now for the routines

Forget the built ins

Adding or editing a routine looks simple too. First I tried adding the "Good morning trigger" to the "Good Morning" routine. That appears to work till try to save it and you get.

This post "Routines aren't saving" seems to say it is smart home devices that no longer work. I found that hard to believe. Then I tried "Hey Google, Good morning" and it kept running the "Good night" routine so editing the built in did not seem to matter anyway.

Starting from scratch

As one last option to try I created a custom routine called "Good morning sunshine" which seems to be the magic needed. It replies that "Homeseer could not be reached" but the Homeseer virtual did trip and trigger the event.

To do that it I created a routine to use instead of using one of the built ins. Then added an action. Note you do not want to tap the "add an action" button which takes you here.

Instead check "Adjust lights, plugs and more" and tap its settings (gear) icon.

To further complicate things I had to use the "Home trigger" as a test since the "Good morning trigger" did not show in the list of devices.

I assume because it is showing offline for some reason despite them looking the same in the Homeseer interface. It does of course still show in the main device list.

In case you need the config to get yours working

Anyway I could now save the routine. I added a couple other actions match the Alexa routine.

Alexa still not an entry level hub replacement

I was writing up a response to someone about IFTTT and Alexa / Wireless Tag integration which will probably but useful later so I'm saving it here as it reflects on Alexa's poor support for sensors. Note Alexa's home automation interface is still better than Google's almost non existent one. (See compare below.)

Why go through IFTTT when you can integrate Wireless Tags direct with Kumo? As in as in my fridge / freezer monitoring setup which updates values as they change in my Homeseer instance which then can trigger any action Homeseer can perform. Which is just about anything. Plus IFTTT was become very unreliable this year.

Alexa Wireless Tag integration sort of works. I can ask the temperature of a sensor for example, "Alexa, what is the temperature of the freezer" and it tells me the reading from my regular sensor in the freezer. Though oddly in the device list I only see motion values for the regular tags and what appears to be temperature for the soil moisture tags. (Not all my soil moisture tags are dead.) Again oddly you can't use the sensor values in routines. Though finding anything in the Alexa device list is almost impossible since it is designed for people the just have a few things. Even stranger:

• You can sort the device list in the web interface but not the android one. 
• The web interface does not let you do anything with the devices on the list other than forget the device.
• Routine management is missing from the web interface.
• The android list interface does have some groups to narrow down the list but way to few. For example, the only way to see a list of the 12 of my 348 devices Alexa sees as "sensors" is to try to create a routine with one. 
• My Homeseer sees 3137 "devices" as I write this. (Note a "device" is data stream or parent. As in a Hue Sensor would be seen as 5 "devices". A parent and 4 sensors, light level, temperature, motion and battery level.) Alexa only sees 348 of those (note some of the 348 are Alexa devices not in the Homeseer count) and only 12 of those as sensors from SmartThings, Wyze, Ring and Hue so far. Even then for example the Hue sensors report motion, temp and light gut Alexa only sees motion info.
• Lack of complex triggers. For example: if no motion has been detected and door opens, turn on light. If motion has been detected and door opens turn off light. Or if any of room motion sensors are tripped reset occupancy timer. When occupancy timer hits X minutes turn off everything in room.

When you have 348 devices (that Alexa sees) like I do, it is almost useless. Amazon REALLY needs to improve their interface so it can scale if they want people to use their routine framework for any logic. So while it would be nice to have Wireless Tags usable as sensors in Alexa to, for instance, announce the fridge is too warm, I do not really see it as big deal till Amazon makes their configuration interface more usable.

To be fair when Alexa is compared to Google's Home:

Cons:

• Google does not even have a web interface so everything must be done via phone or tablet.
• Often skills like Harmony where with Alexa you would say "Alexa, turn on Netflix". With Google that worked then it went to you had to say "Hey Google, Ask Harmony to turn on Netflix." and then often tells me it did not recognize me and would not do it. Now it seems to be back to just "turn on" BUT for instance when I say "turn on Hero" (my PC's name) to Alexa is just works. I say "turn on Hero" to Google it starts playing something from Pandora.
• It appears too that at some point Google Home lost some of the account links I had setup.

• Lately the Googles (I have a Home and 3 minis) seem to say try again in a few seconds a lot.
• To discover new devices you say "Alexa, discover devices." You say this to Google and it finds phones and asks if you want to ring them. Ask "how do I get you to discover devices", you get "I don't understand" and "I found a related how to get Alexa to discover devices"! It is also easy to do from the Alexa app with a swipe down. Instructions I found online say Google's Home should do that too but it appears to do nothing for me.
• Google appears to allow one Harmony hub to be connected while Alexa allows many. (I have 5 currently)
• Adding skills to Home is an egg hunt compared to Alexa. I just tried to add the Wyze skill for example and I had to search on line to even figure it out. Then while trying to link the account it just exited half way through me entering my login info.
• Wyze, Alexa sees all the cams, motion and contact sensors I have. Google sees on the cameras and contact sensors.
• Google routines still appear to be voice command triggered only while Alexa's allow triggering using voice, time, some sensors (see above), location, alarms, echo button presses and "Guard state".

Pros:

• The devices list in Google does seem to use the room from Homeseer. However I had to add each Wyze and Wireless Tag device to a room during the setup process manually. 

If you think your device is spying on you, then you are missing the point.

Why does this keep coming up? No one buying a $25 cam or < $50 voice assistant is a hot ad target. Much less a blackmail target. Just think about it for a second and it is obvious. It all comes down to ROI. Processing audio much less video to the point of getting data points out of it is costly. Note devices are getting more powerful all the time. Processing is moving from the cloud to the device. So not long from now it might be cost effective to pull ad data from every word heard by a speaker but right now it is not. Note too even with local recog the assistant needs a wake word / phrase to know it is being talked to to pull that voice from the stream of other voices (like a TV or radio) surrounding it.

Streaming audio, much less video, 24/7 is going to get noticed. Lots of people have looked at the traffic on these devices and found nothing unexpected. Note Wyze used to use servers in China but people complained about it right away and they switched to US servers. But in the posts I mainly see it is "someone told me that it was doing X." Or some sort of vague thing like I talked about this thing and then saw an ad for it. Usually something not all that unusual for them to see an ad for.

However IF the makers of these devices were going to do something malicious the odds are MUCH more likely they would be used as bots for attacking REAL targets. As in companies and agencies. Either for extortion or brute forcing access. An even greater worry ought to be that these cheap devices probably are not that secure and might be pulled into a third parties botnet. Either way unless it is activated you would not expect to see any significant traffic. Note though, while you might be a "real" target, there are lots of script kiddies out there that might just use you to learn on and or try stuff out before going after a real target. They hit my websites and bang against my home firewall all the time. And since they do not know what they are doing they can REALLY screw things up if they get access.

That said if you give a damn about your data security you ought to have decent network gear that lets you monitor traffic and put your IoT on a network isolated from data you care about. Allow no inbound traffic and on the IoT network only allow outbound traffic as need. As a rule cameras should talk to nothing outside your network other than any cloud storage they might be linked to. On your data network you should be using a DNS that at minimum filters known bad actors. That is just life in the 21st century. Like door locks in the 20th.

Or just hope for the best and not worry about it. There is NO point in worrying about something without doing something about it much less doing any research. After all I hear some people still happily leave their doors unlocked.

Alexa vs Google revisited.

As so many of these this started as a reply to a question on a Facebook group. In this case what is up the Google Assistant and Homeseer? After a rather lengthy response I thought I should flesh it out even more an post it here. I'm just comparing my experience living with them nt side by side features. In my opinion both Amazon and Google are trying to push hard into siloed home automation which is just wrong. Interoperability is the future and local control is a must. Expect to see local (cloud independent) voice assistants REAL soon.

I find I'm using Google Home less and less. Mainly I use Home when Alexa is one of her moods (had another badly weighted update pushed) but things seem to have peaked with Google Home.
For an example it used to be "tell Harmony to turn on TiVo."
Then is was just "turn on TiVo"
But then "Turn on TiVo" got you "Do you want to use Harmony for that?" "Yes". In diff voice "Turning on TiVo".
Then "Turn on TiVo" got you "Do you want to use Harmony for that?" "Yes." "I don't recognize your voice."
Now back to "Tell Harmony to turn on TiVo." and half the time it says it does not recognize my voice. Which is even more irksome considering how often it responds to someone on the TV or a podcast just saying Google without even the hey. Not to mention all the times I'm not sure what triggered it.

Sorry but having to remember which thing this week to ask to turn something on or off on top of the name for the thing I had to give it so it did not sounds like something else, is just is not going to get you market share. Especially if it keeps telling me it will not do stuff cause it does not recognize my voice. Granted maybe if I spent more time tweaking it I could improve it a bit but that kind of misses the point of it and I've not had to mess with Alexa other than adding devices and alias TV to TiVo after one especially bad update. Though I have to admit recently I added my "Good morning" "routine" so instead of just telling Homeseer to put the house in day mode it also tells me some fun fact and the weather.

I should note too Google is more likely to false trigger and to just not respond than Alexa if it does not know what to do. So it might be having trouble listening when you think it is down. Though Alexa is getting more like Home in that respect. I keep the notification sounds on so I know when they think they heard something but ignored it. Which is why I just do not get people that complain about Alexa saying OK. But then I work in IT so I kind of expect a certain amount of errors. Like saying "thank you" to end a follow on sequence it just makes sense from a programmer's mindset.

Anyway contrast the above with Alexa will generally get a voice command at least by the third try if I have not triggered it some other way before that. Some responses just make you go huh? Like the other yesterday when I said "Alexa , turn on video", a command to switch my main video stream from the triggered security cams back to what I was watching and unpause. Her response, "I can not find a device named lamp." Then too I started putting Echo buttons about as backups / quicker response for things like sending OK / Select to the device currently playing video or signalling the house to go into away mode. They light up green instead of saying OK so you know the command got through. Used to have an Echo button for TiVo skip too before they made that automatic. Planning on getting some more Prime day. Note you can only pair 4 to an Alexa and they are only reliable to around 20 feet though a wall. At 2 for $14 (on sale price) hard to beat for when you just need an easy to hit button. Like advancing to the next show while washing dishes with the volume up. Both seem able to pick your voice out of impressive levels of room noise but you can only expect so much.

Note too IFTTT has been having a ton of issues with Homeseer, among others, lately. So I wonder sometimes which end it is truly on. Or if maybe something in the middle is the iffy bit. Which why you always have back methods for every trigger no matter the interface. Even the local ones.

Why female voice assistant?

Scifi female computer and androids generally good and male ones generally bad.

Examples:

Hitchhikers diff school marm vs Eddie.

Like black pres scfi more of an experiance / memory thing than sexist / racist thing.

Lifx after a year

LIFX Mini White (A19) Wi-Fi Smart LED Light Bulb, Dimmable, Warm White, No Hub Required, Works with Alexa, Apple HomeKit and the Google Assistant

WiFi / Reliability

I bought one of these a year ago to see if it would work better in a area I have where RF devices seem to have issues. Hue bulbs and even Z-wave devices out there  Unfortunately the WiFi is so weak in these bulbs that it is no more reliable than the Hue bulb I had in the same place. Note Hue and WiFi operate in the same frequency range so strength of signal is the main deciding factor between them working reliably. Hue tends to operate at shorter distances but works in a mesh so the distance to the next bulb is more important than distance to the hub. How bad you ask. Here is the signal strength stats for it and a Wyze v2, which has the worse WiFi performance of any IP camera I've tried, sitting near each other. The Unifi Outdoor+ AP is less than 20 feet away though a single interior wall.

It also seems these bulbs can occasionally just lose WiFi connection and have to be setup again to get them back. Adding them back is fairly simple but you probably do not want to have deal with doing it without a serious feature to balance that out. Especially since you are paying extra.

Note after adding mine back in today I noticed there was a firmware update so I attempted update the bulb via the Android app. So far it has failed 4 times over 7 hours even with that 92% signal strength. I tried to get the Windows app too but it seems to be hanging at install. That might mean there are Lifx server issues. The bulb does seem to work fine from the Android app but not Homeseer till I also restarted the plugin.

Price

A 4 pack of Hue white bulbs will run you around $40 to $50.

As I write this the Mini White I have is going for $25 each. Even the cheapest used price is $14 so cost is not really a pro.

Oddly however if you want off white, LIFX Mini Day & Dusk (A19) Wi-Fi Smart LED Light Bulb is running a dollar cheaper right now.

I also thought about getting some of their LIFX + (BR30) Wi-Fi Smart LED Light Bulb with Infrared for Night Vision, Adjustable, Multicolor, Dimmable, No Hub Required, Works with Alexa, Apple HomeKit and Google Assistant bubs. In 4 packs they can be had for about $60 per. Last year they dropped as low as $46 per in a 4 pack. Still though unless you need color it is a hard sell given IR floods like the Univivi Infrared Illuminator, 850nm 6 LEDs 90 Degree Wide Angle IR Illuminator Night Vision,Waterproof LED Infrared Light IP Camera,CCTV Security Camera go for $23. If you are wanting color outdoor lighting though Lifx is competitive even if you do not need IR illumination. As a white flood / IR combo though a Z-wave switch on regular floods and adding the above IR flood would seem to be the most cost effective and reliable solution. Especially if you already have a home automation hub.

Etekcity WiFi Smart Plug

Test Etekcity WiFi Smart Plug, Voltson Mini Outlet with Energy Monitoring (2-Pack), No Hub Required, ETL Listed, White, Works with Alexa, Google Home and IFTTT

So far have not found an API to allow Homeseer to talk to them directly though you can easier connect them via IFTTT.  Note however I found I needed to reconnect IFTTT to Etekcity at least once so far to get things working again even though no errors seemed to be reported anywhere in the chain. So a heartbeat system might be in order.

Update: 

I did find this sample code for control via Python you might find useful for creating a plugin or bridge. There is no documentation I could find for this API and the examples people have posted seems to vary some but I was able to use it to create a Homeseer VB script documented at the end of this post. While still cloud based it is working as I write (update) this while the IFTTT still appears to be broken over 2 weeks past my original post.

Create Homeseer device

First you will want to create a virtual device in Homeseer. Since this maker supports state change triggers for off. on, online and offline make it dimmable 

and with and status values like this.

Link through IFTTT

Note it might take IFTTT a few minutes to pick up changes so best if create your virtual devices all up front then wait a bit for proceeding.

As with all such IFTTT linkages you will want at least and off and on IFTTT applet for each direction. In this case we will also want a 5th applet to send offline notices back to Homeseer.

First to control the plug when the Homeseer device changes create and applet like this

To go back the other way create on like this

Note about the time I started writing this the IFTTT Etekcity linkage seems to have quit working. Checking back a week later it is still not working.

The hidden API way

As mentioned above I found a very few posts claiming "direct control" (still through Vesync servers) of the plugs. Many refer to hosts and ports that seem to be incorrect or no longer active. But I did get this sample code for control via Python to work.

While you can install python and required modules then modify the scripts to be called from Homeseer events (I did this as a test) you lose logging and remote editing options so I did the work of converting it to VB. vesync.vb us pretty much standalone but I keep all my logins in a seperate file to make sharing easier.

To leverage the above objects in GUIs I created on and off events triggered state change of the matching virtual object (see above). They should look something like this

Lastly add a reset event

Then you can add a rest event to tie it all together. Note since this controls the virtuals and the virtuals trigger controls this works with the IFTTT, API call method or both. My reset events look like this.

Note for triggers I'm using MyMonitor to set Homeseer virtuals based on state info from Blue Iris. You could also use the Blue Iris Plug-In by Highpeak Software plugin. I have multiple Blue Iris servers though and the Highpeak plugin only supports one. Also MyMonitor can run on a seperate PC which can be helpful if load or number of plugins is an issue. Plus of course MyMonitor lets you monitor about anything accessible from the network and it is open source / free to use.

Interesting contrast to 4 years ago.

Funny I shared this article on Facebook 4 years ago when feeling depressed at the phone and cloud centric home automation then. Interesting to read again in light of the voice and cloud centric home automation we see now. Though SmartThings has been moving away from the cloud most have not and the voice interfaces are being marketed as "home automation" even though they are basically just remote controls.  Four years ago was also before I scrapped my Veras and upgraded to Homeseer which pretty much ticks all the boxes. The only real missing bit for Homeseer is Zigbee support. Though between Hue and SmartThings hubs that can be linked into Homeseer as well. Plus there are very few Zigbee devices that are not available in Z-wave and or WiFi versions these days.

Voice data bandwidth, a quick test, could Alexa listen all the time even if they wanted too?

Seeing a lot of posts about Amazon seeking a patent for voice sniffing which seems to imply they either do have the capacity on the device to recognize a whole list of trigger word or they plan on streaming all your voice to the cloud to be processed for key words. For example "Amazon patent reveals 'voice sniffer algorithm' that could analyze conversations". My response was:

These are the same devices that supposedly do not have the ability to let us select our own trigger word but will be listening for variations of I like or hate that? Does not add up. In theory they could stream all your voice to the cloud servers but that quickly starts taking up some serious bandwidth and server resources. 

Plus for all that, all they are going to find is I love my pets and hate slow computers and the cable company. No news there. Given the false triggers both my Alexas and Homes get they would build more of a profile of the characters I watch on TV than me. They would have to sort the whole speaker recog first. Alexa still is having big issues with that. Being able to read your emotional state is simple be comparison and they are still working on that. Then there is the whole I'm commenting on something I'm looking at instead of what Alexa last heard too.
Most likely here they are looking to cash in if someone attempts such a silly thing.

But as part of that I tried to find just how much data a request takes. I could not find an actual spec online so I asked my Echo Show and one of my Google Minis the time. The Mini used 254.5 KB processing the request and 26.7 KB while I was talking to Alexa. Alexa used 213.6 KB processing the request and 0 KB while I was talking to the Mini. By comparison my Roamio TiVo used 12.9 during both exchanges. That was way more than I expected and puts this even more in doubt. It takes roughly a second to say "what time is it" so those are pretty close to the kbps rates the devices sending your requests at. So say 5 of them streaming continuously would swamp the 1 Mbps upload speed of many US ISPs. Granted a lot of ISPs are advertising "up to" 5 Mbps upload now but that is still a lot especially if you are using the ISPs router provided WiFi. Then there is the other end where a server now needs to handle not only usual requests, say a 30 a day. That server has gone from processing and average of 74 bps total (over a day) to 213.6 times the number of devices I have every second of every day. That is 2886 times the amount of data needing processed now.

The other assumption that they are going to move some of the processing local for this, even though they say the devices to not have the horsepower to handle user defined trigger words. This would seem to be squashed as well given the amount of data sent just to process "what time is it".

Google Home vs Amazon's Alexa for voice control of automation.

I see someone ask this almost every day in one of the automation groups. As hard as these guys are working to out do each other which is better ALL depends on what you want to do AND what day it is. There is no sign they will even play nice with each other so you still probably want both for the near future if not long term. To answer which is better for you, if you have to have just one, you need to fall back to the old list method. What is it you want from voice control? Any deal breakers? Now look at the latest (like within the last week) reviews and announcements and check off your list. Seriously though if you are getting into home automation $50 is not that much to risk on just trying them both out. Each of you sensors and controlled devices is going to run about the same $30-50. Keep an eye out for sales and you could get a Dot for as little as $29. Google express and Wal-mart had a deal going on for months where you could get $25 back on the $50 price.

Talking to home automation is at least 80% what I use these for. The remainder is almost all adding stuff to lists and alarms / reminders. So here is an exchange I have almost every day which drives me nuts and to me sums up the argument as far as which is better for home automation voice control is concerned. It is not always this bad but it has been all too often.

(Note from memory so maybe not exact phrasing and Alexa follow-up on.)

me: Alexa, turn on TiVo
Alexa: I can not find TV
me: Hey Google turn on TiVo
Alexa: I don't answer to that
Home: Sure for that you might to ask Harmony. Would you like to try that?
me: Yes
Home: I was unable to verify your voice. Please try again or adjust setting in app.
me: Alexa, turn on TiVo
Alexa: I can not find TV
me: Hey Google turn on TiVo
Alexa: I don't answer to that
Home: Sure for that you might to ask Harmony. Would you like to try that?
me: Yes
Harmony: Turning on TiVo.

Sometimes either will even work first try. It is interesting to note though Google always knows I want TiVo and only fails allowing me to turn it on while Alexa fails realizing while there is no TV on my list there is a TiVo. It would seem Alex's problem would be easier for developers to fix given it has a list of items to compare to what I asked for. As in if item is not located, do fuzzy search and ask did you mean [closest match]?  Another example is Iris3 (my north security camera server). Alexa has no trouble at all with Iris2 and Iris4 but is almost pathological in not understanding Iris3. While Google gets it right every time.

On the flip side, I like Alexa's integrated list features better (though both are lacking in my book) and when I'm ready to go to bed I say Alexa, wake me up at 7 AM [pause for response] Goodnight and kicks off the event which confirms everything and if is puts house into sleep mode. I think can almost to the same with Google too (you need to use the word and between command phrases) but the Alexa sequence works well and feels more natural to me. It is also kind of cool that with follow-up turned on (the bit that let's you ask more than one thing with out saying her name again, usually) you can say "thank you" to end an exchange and she gives you a random friendly reply like "You bet!" So for today anyway I'm leaning Alexa. But I have the mix. As of this writing I have an Echo, a Home, a Show, 2 Minis, 7 Dots and 2 Wands.

Oh and as far as answering general questions I think Google has been able to answer about 10% of the time and Alexa about 5% but that could well be what I'm asking.

Update Jan 6 2019

I finally defined TV as an alias for TiVo. That worked for awhile then it started saying it it could not find TiVo (literally Tee Vo) as a device. Currently when I say "turn on Tivo" I often get "can't find that channel" then "can't find device Tivo" then finally it works on third try. Oddly it does seem to get Iris 3 better these days.

Since the above post I add a 3rd gen Dot for over half off mainly just to try. I also added a Fire tablet 8 and 3 Fire tablet 7s (3 for $78 on sale Prime day!) connected to external speakers as virtual Amazon Shows that can also run the Homeseer app to play announcements plus display / control connected devices. For the most part the Fire tablets work great for this though they do seem to lose contact with Homeseer from time to time.

On the plus side I picked up a couple pairs of Echo Buttons during the holiday sales for just $14 ($7 a button). You can hang up to 4 off an Echo device. Note one downside is you do not seem to be able to give them a name and the names they get are pretty useless like EchoBtn2LB and EchoBtn2WT.

Personally I find more and more I'm only using my Google devices for non automation related actions. I have not felt the need to add any. When the Alexas screw up I just reach for a remote, button, tablet or browser depending on which is closest.

Last my Wands do not seem to even be able to tell time now. They are still connecting WiFi so hard to say what changed without doing packet level debug. Since they were pretty much worthless when they did "work" I do not see much point in trying to sort what is wrong.

I must be missing something

Seems like the world is following in the footsteps of a Rube Goldberg comic.
For instance I've seen posted, multiple times now, people putting Echo Dots in their cars to stream music despite the fact it need to use their phone's data to stream. Why not just use the phone?
Another example is one going around of people BUYING the OLD (no longer made) IR to X10 interfaces and a Harmony hub to control X10 devices from their Alexa! I mean you can get a version 2 SmartThings hub for $50 and Z-wave switches as cheap as $25 for a single or $37 for a double outlet so why buy a Harmony hub for $75+ (more if you want it with the remote) PLUS for another $30-$50 to control up to 16 devices max? Not only more cost, unless you have many devices to control, the extra hops make it more error prone, X10 itself has serious issues with many modern things interfering with it's power line signals and if anything breaks you are probably going to have to dig up a used replacement on Ebay and hope it works.
Let me be clear, I used X10 for decades generally working fine till around 2010 when it started driving me nuts being generally being flaky. And automation is my thing so I have all the test equipment and such. I'd often spend a day back then running around with test equipment, plugging and unplugging stuff while monitoring signal levels, tracking down what device was messing my signal that day. In the end I had noise filters on almost as many devices as I controlled. Insteon tried to keep things going by adding RF connections into the X10 mix but it did not help my set up stability at all. Either because of legacy X10 stuff in the mix or something else I could not see. In 2014 I finally decided to try one of the new hubs and never looked back. So it boggles my mind people are still trying to work with X10. It is like someone trying to explain how a PDA and a flip phone are better than a cheap smart phone. BTW a nice write up on the diffs between Insteon, Z-Wave and ZigBee can be found here. Note the chart at the bottom showing what the top 10 security company support. You really want to keep what devices are going to work with your next hub since odds are you will be upgrading at some point.

I can even see stuff like this Google Home built from a Raspberry Pi as a learning project but don't tell me it is a cheap Google Home. $54 for the kit is cheaper than a Google Home but assumes you have a Pi 3 you do not need for anything else or you need to add another $50 to that and what you end up with is not near as easy to use as the $100 - $129 Google Home. Rumor is there a Dot like Home in the works that will be as cheap as the $35-$50 Dot. So if you want a Home instead of an Echo but have an issue with the cost, you might want to just wait for that.

First Look: Google Home is still a work in progress

Google Home is not quiet as polished as the Amazon Echo For instance the Echo will search your network for devices while the Home you have to tell it which devices. Homeseer is not supported yet even though it is listed on their web site. Though the Home plug-in for Homeseer is supposed to be ready soon.

The main thing that I bought it for is the one thing it does do that Echo does not. Pass a string to IFTTT. So you can for instance make an applet to log your dreams or ideas you have. And the recognition seems a bit better than Echo too. But do not get too excited because not all actions take a parameter. For instance you can not set up an applet to run any event you say. You still have to do one for each event. Hopefully that will get sorted when the Homeseer plug-in for Home gets released.

Update 8/8/2017

Unfortunately Homeseer still is not linking but I have to say I'm liking this name your own trigger phrase feature more and more. It basically lets you add skills using IFTTT as long as you just want to send a message some where. For instance I used to have an IFTTT applet set up so when I'd add a to-do via Alexa it would get added to my Remember the Milk inbox. The problems were at first that meant using some extra channel to get it from the Amazon list to Remember the Milk. In my case Twitter which meant I got a DM notification every time. Then Remember the Milk got a skill about the same time the trigger word "remember" seemed to stop working. So for example, instead of "Alexa, remember, pick up milk" it became having to say "Alexa, tell Remember The Milk to remind me to pick up the milk at 5pm". I would still need to clear out my Amazon to-do list. Todist on the other hand has a much less polished interface than Remember the Milk BUT it interfaces directly with Amazon so anything I do in my Amazon shopping and to-do lists syncs without any plumbing on my part. So now I can say  "Alexa, add 'pick up the milk' to my to-do list" and get it added without all the notifications.

Now compare that with Google Home. I just create an IFTTT  applet that lets me say "Hey Google, remind me to pick up milk" and it adds it to my Todoist inbox with a priority, due now and a couple tags. The phrasing just flows. Like the memo one above it is nice to be able to pick my own trigger phrase. Note to call an IFTTT from Alexa directly like that you have to say "Alexa, trigger [phrase]" and [phrase] just tells it which applet to run and it does not get passed on. Plus Google Home seems to be better at transcribing text than Alexa. For instance for testing I tried to add "convert homeseer counters to objects". Google got it right. Alexa transcribed it as "for home seer counters".

Updated 10/20/2017

Still can not get Awair or Homeseer to link.

I did get Harmony linked but I can only link in one of the hubs. By default you have to start everything "ask harmony to" as in "Hey Google, ask harmony to turn on hulu". If you want to just say "turn on hulu" like you would do with Alexa then you need to create a shortcut. Note if you have a Chromecast linked by default "turn on Hulu" will try and stream to it. Also when you set up short cuts use the mic to input the shortcut or it may not work. This is a bit more of a pain to set up but it does let you choose what device to play what on though since Fire TV seems to be unsupported in might not make that much difference. Unfortunately you can't just create a shortcut like the "Remind me to" one above but at least you can create a simple one like "to do list" which will bring up the Todoist app which will prompt you from there so you do not have remember which app to bring up and how.

I should probably note here too in order to change the friendly names in Google Home you currently need to unlink and relink Harmony. There is not edit. In Alexa you can edit the names names now of smart home devices, groups and scenes. Scenes is were you will find the friendly names for Harmony activities, channels and devices.

Updated 12/31/2017

After seeing posts in the Homeseer Facebook group claiming it worked with Home I decided to give it another go. This time I did get Homeseer to link accounts and import 83 controls which is short to all of them. It still seems to not grab room info. IIt appears to have pulled in about half of the Hue lights and dimmers (for some reason) on the house hub and none from the shop and barn hubs which my Homeseer knows about. No groups but the all lights on hub. So about 10% of the Hue "things" Homeseer shows. This is fewer than Home pulled from SmartThings months back. (I still have SmartThings hubs for some legacy stuff and experiments.) It does appear to have imported in most (maybe all but hard to tell with so many and the diff in interfaces) Z-wave Switch Binary devices from the 4 networks connected to my Homeseer, my Nest thermostat and virtual devices. It did see the Lifx bulb but not the Ranchio, Harmony hubs, Sonos speakers or Onkyo that are WiFi controlled by my Homeseer. One more point. While linking stuff to rooms I ran into a few problems. When adding a new room the rooms got double added some how. I had to go back and remove the duplicated rooms that had no devices in them. Sometimes adding devices to a room did not save either and I had to go back and link them again. Also it appears you can only add a device to a room. That is fine for filtering lists but if you are grouping for control, which is the case here, that makes it not very useful.

BTW Awair still asks for your login and then just goes back to the devices screen with out error or linking. Tried Lifx and TP-link for first time now that I have a devices to test with and it imported fine. Thought my Nest account was linked but was shows as not so relinked it without issue. Note it took me 3 tries (that Google Home said it understood) before I could turn up the heat on my Nest Thermostat. "Tell Nest to set the temperature to 70" did not seem to actually do anything despite it saying it was doing it. "Set the living room temperature to 70" did seem to work but it could be it just took that long for the first command to make it though all the hops.

For added fun I thought I'd try relinking my Hue account to Home to see if that would allow Home to see the other hubs or just switch hubs to get control of the shop lights. Unfortunately it gets all the way to the final step and flashes a quick message about failing to update. After doing this a few times it did actually update despite the error. But it still only sees the house hub. I'm guessing because when you log into the Hue web interface you can only view one hub (like the official Hue app) and Google goes though the cloud instead of talking directly to the hubs like Alexa does.

Updating devices list

You can now (Dec 2017) say "sync my devices" to Google Assistant (on your phone, Google Home, etc) to refresh all of your smart home services. For example, if you have Philips Hue lights and WeMo outlets, Google will pull the full list of your devices from those services. You can also just refresh a certain category, with something like "sync my lights."

Others thoughts

Granted the landscape is changing fast but here are some articles of where things were at times.

Cnet MARCH 14, 2017: 7 things Amazon Echo can do that Google Home can't

Cnet APRIL 26, 2017: 8 things Google Home can do that Alexa can't

Google Home developer guide.