Google Home, Home Assistant and Aqara

Aqara Products
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I’m looking for a recommendation using an integration between Google Home, Aqara and potentially Home Assistant.

I use Google Home for voice integrations and I’d like to use presence sensors to detect turning on devices using voice. For example, when someone enters a room I’d like for questions to be asked like if it’s after dusk, turn on the lights, turn on the tv, etc. I realize this will be annoying until it’s more fine tuned because if you enter a room quickly, you don’t necessarily want the tv on. I’d like to create automations to do it. Ideas? I can integrate Home Assistant if necessary but don’t have it currently and use water and presence sensors from Aqara.

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Put Home Assistant in the middle. Use Aqara presence (FP2 zones or FP300 PIR+mmWave) → Aqara hub → HA (HomeKit Bridge usually exposes more entities than Matter today). Let HA handle logic, and let Google do voice prompts/commands.

What works well

  • Presence that isn’t annoying:
    • Require presence > 8–15s before doing anything (filters quick pass-throughs).
    • Only prompt after dusk (sun elevation or lux from sensor).
    • Cooldown flag so you don’t ask more than once per 30–60 min (input_boolean.asked_recently).
    • If room was just occupied in the last N min, don’t ask again (input_datetime last_occupied).
  • Modes to change behavior:
    • input_select.room_mode = Relax / Movie / Reading. “Hey Google, set living room to movie mode” flips how automations react (e.g., allow TV prompts in Movie only).
  • TV suggestion guardrails:
    • Only suggest TV when presence > 60s AND 6–11 pm AND media_player idle AND mode ∈ {Relax, Movie}.
  • Combine sensors:
    • FP2 zones (e.g., “sofa” zone) or FP300 stillness to decide when to ask vs. when to just turn on a low-level scene.

Integrations

  • Aqara → HA: HomeKit Bridge from the Aqara hub tends to expose more events (button multi-press, occupancy, zones). Matter works, but features vary by device/firmware.
  • Google → HA: Use the official Google Assistant integration or a Routine → Webhook to trigger HA scripts.
  • Voice flow: Let HA decide “should I ask?” If yes, fire a script that sends a Google broadcast/assistant prompt like “It’s dim. Turn on lights?” Map “Yes” to a HA script via routine.
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This sounds almost exactly what I want to do; apparently you’ve either thought a lot about it or have been doing it a while. Thank you!

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If you’re going to add Home Assistant I can strongly recommend getting Frigate up and runnign as well - this allows for even more contextualisation by taking the feed on an Aqara camera (or any ONVIF/RSTP feed) to provide facial recognition that when combined with the FP2 allows it to detect who is in a particular zone - so sit on the couch and it asks that specific person if they’d like the TV turned on and pick up where they were with Netflix, or listen to music, or mute all notifications for them for a few hours while they have a nap. I run a Hailo-8 on a CM5 PoE board and still finding new ways to combine it’s AI capabilities and combining various sensors.

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for frigate facial detection a coral is fine and cheaper than a halo-8, I would only recommend the halo-8 with a bit of genai with frigate (obviously more powerful stuff is better but for frigate its fine).

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I had thought about adding a camera to provide further context to the scene and these are some great tips, although I have no idea yet what each does :slight_smile:

Thank you and I appreciate this stuff!

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Yeah I found the Coral was fine for light Frigate use, but its lack of recent updates and high current market price make it harder to recommend over newer options. The Hailo-8L offers ~13 TOPS (or Hailo-8’s 26 TOPS) vs Coral’s ~4 TOPS, with lower power draw, active SDK development, and multiple form factors, giving more headroom for ALPR, facial recognition, and higher camera counts without needing to stack devices later.

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Maybe I got lucky mine is the pcie-m2 formfactor (dual) and only paid £34 on it because i pre ordered it when people were scalping them. my Home assistant is a bit overkill though. I have frigate using 11.2G of ram and deepstack using 2.7g lol

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One of the main advantages of Home Assistant is that it allows you to connect Zigbee devices directly, without needing a separate hub from each manufacturer. So if you’re using Home Assistant with a compatible Zigbee dongle or coordinator, is the Aqara hub still necessary? Shouldn’t you be able to you connect Aqara devices directly without the Awara hub to Home Assistant?

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you can, but it takes a while for devices to come over unless you know how to do the coding yourself.

but I think the m.3 hub is essential for doorbell and being able to pass over actions from aqara devices through matter to home assistant.

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