Show HN: Control IKEA Lights Using Google Home and IFTTT (opens in new tab)

Hi! I'm the co-founder of https://snips.ai and we build a 100% on-device Voice AI platform.

The ASR and NLU are running on a Raspberry Pi 3, and best of all it is free and we are open-sourcing it, starting with the NLU https://github.com/snipsco/snips-nlu

https://medium.com/snips-ai/snips-nlu-is-an-open-source-priv...

The whole platform runs on-device which makes it ideal for privacy, cost, and to allow it to run when there is no network

We are available in English, French, German, and soon Japanese and Korean, with more European languages coming!

We would love to see what you can build with it, and linking it to Ikea lights should be 10 lines of Python

Take a look at what some people have built with it: https://github.com/snipsco/awesome-snips

and a few tutorials to get you started: https://medium.com/snips-ai/building-a-voice-controlled-home...

The IKEA lights that the article talks about have remotes [1] that work independently of the smart home gateway.

[1] http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20303317/

Every smart bulb I've seen has a fallback where toggling the light switch turns it on, even if the software state was off.

3rd party services going away is a legitimate concern, but that's true of basically every piece of technology these days.

You sound like an old man decrying escalators because you won’t rely on any means of transportation that requires electricity to function.... escalators without electricity are just stairs, IKEA lights controlled through google home without internet are just lightbulbs controlled by the wireless switch. Just like your google home without internet is just a wireless speaker. In all cases it’s just nice features that are super pleasant to use in practice and preople just don’t know how nice it feels to have them until the experience them for themselves.

I guess if it doesn’t work for you, you should skip the thread so as not to drown out the effort.

Someday someone might come along and build the thing you want. Perhaps they will build on this project.

The problem with this type of system is that the primary benefit is outnumbered by at least two unwanted detriments.

The primary benefit is that remote control can be effective from around the world and outer space.

This is countered by the reality that your command might get bounced off a satellite, even if you’re across the room from the device you’re controlling remotely.

The converse additional problem is that you could be standing next to a device on the north pole, and someone from antarctica could override you.

We haven’t become sophisticated enough about this level of remote control yet, to mitigate these undesirable side effects of extended range remoting via internet tunnels.

I agree. I also really appreciate the build quality in the remote.

I am a bit disappointed by their slowness in supporting Google Home by default - hence my project. It would be a lot better if they actually open-sourced the code for the gateway.

How's the responsiveness/latency? I have a Hue setup with the old circular bridge and can't stand how unpredictable the delay is between sending a command and the lights responding.

If you are using Home Assistant and you want a free, open-source and 100% on-device solution to build a Voice AI you can take a look at what we build at Snips https://snips.ai

You can build your Voice AI in English, French, German, and soon Japanese and Korean, with more European languages coming

It runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 and will be 100% free for makers

That's cool. I mostly wanted a quick REST API to use with IFTTT, without a ton of dependencies. Home Assistant looks interesting. Maybe I'll give it a try sometimes.

I'm currently rely on Google Home which allows me to remotely control things away from home. What are my options when I switch to Home Assistant? Can I still control things using Google Assistant? Can I still remotely control things without VPN back home?