Custom webook directly in google assistant? All questions

Currently my sequence here sends 5 webhook calls to ifttt. Before their decision i had migrated most of what I automate outside of ifttt and stringify. I now use mostly google routines. Is there anyway to have google talk directly here to the many webhook calls? 

If not, what other webhook service is there? I've only been able to find ifttt and zapier. I see the custom webhook in the docs, but i'm not sure if it will here like i'm hoping. If it can, please let me know. I've never written a custom webhook like the docs describe but I'm willing to learn.

Thanks!

Asked by JeffGraf on September 29, 2020, at 2:02am

Hi Jeff. Just to confirm, are you wanting your Google routine to trigger a sequence in SEQUEmatic?

If so, there is a Google action which will let you do that. First you'll need to ask the Google assistant to 'talk to SEQUEmatic' in order to link your account. Unfortunately it often has difficulty understanding the word SEQUEmatic, so if you can use your phone and type to the assistant that will work better. 

After your account is linked, you can trigger sequences from the assistant by saying 'Ask SEQUEmatic to run the evening lights sequence' where 'evening lights' is the name of one of your sequences. To trigger this from a routine, you could type that sentence as one of the steps in the routine.

Hopefully that achieves what you need, but let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks. My current sequence relies on ifttt. Obviously with those changes I'm looking for a change.

I think I'll try to build the same the same sequence but find a way to still issue the same commands and wait sequences.

Would I need to build a custom webhook? And if so, is there another service I would need to use to call those webhooks?

To expand on my reply, I see philips hue can now be linked. I linked it but can't find a way to put this into a sequence.

Hi Jeff. What would you be building the custom webhook to connect to?  Are you able to list out the steps you're trying to achieve in the sequence, from the trigger to the various devices and other steps that need to be run?

Philips Hue is a very recent addition and is somewhat experimental. Once your account is linked your devices should appear under the Smart Device step, however I've checked your account and it looks like something went wrong in the account linking process. Can you please unlink and link again and let me know if that resolves the issue?

I got the Hue relinked. That's working now. All good there.

Below are my steps. I'm just trying to figure out if there is a way I can run through Google or another service to avoid IFTTT since this sequence alone exceeds their limit of 3 events you can create. Or if I have to use ifttt to trigger it and then run the rest of sequence outside of ifttt webhooks

Triggered by IFTTT Timeout trigger event

Call the IFTTT event red_light_timeout

Pause for 1 minutes 30 seconds

Call the IFTTT event yellow_light_timeout

Pause for 1 minutes 25 seconds

Call the IFTTT event green_light_timeout

Pause for 5 seconds

Call the IFTTT event normal_lights_timeout

Good to hear on the account linking. 

Are each of these IFTTT events controlling Hue lights? If so you should be able to do that now that your account is linked without using IFTTT. At the moment the Philips Hue integration only controls individual lights so if you want to turn on or off a group of lights you will need a step for each of them. I'm looking at adding scenes as well but haven't gotten there yet. 

Yeah they each call a separate event to do something with the light at different time intervals. I'm thinking now that hue is showing as linked I can work around it.

Thinking I can use IFTTT as the main trigger and then change these sequences to not use IFTTT webhooks.

I'm on the right track now. But I do have one other question. I've read the docs on custom webhook but I'm just not getting it. Is there any other docs or knowledge I can read up on to get a better idea of how I can use them?

If you're wanting to control the colour of your lights, I haven't been able to add that yet. I'm planning to take a look at it this weekend, so you could potentially test it once it's done.

What is the main trigger you're using on IFTTT?  I might be able to add that directly in SEQUEmatic as well, depending what it is.

Custom webhook allow you to trigger your sequence from another service and pass additional data to it. It really depends on where you're trying to trigger the sequence from. As one example, another user has the Emby home media platform and wanted to adjust their lights based on whether or not a video was playing. Emby can make a webhook call and it passes the status (eg play, pause, fast forward etc) as a payload in the webhook.  The existing IFTTT webhook wasn't sufficient for this, so I added the custom webhook and a schema that matched the format Emby uses for its data. If there's a service you're wanting to use as a trigger but SEQUEmatic doesn't support it, let me know and there might be another schema I could add which would work for you.

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