On our most recent IoT Podcast, Jonathan called in to our voicemail hotline with a smart home question. He uses Google Home along with various smart lights. And his sons keep turning off the lights in Jonathan’s bedroom. So he’s wondering: Is there a way to limit who can voice control his smart home devices?
You’d think there would be since Google Home has a Voice Match feature. With it, Google shows or speaks information relevant to the person who’s speaking. Unfortunately, the voice matching doesn’t do much more than that currently.
There is a parental control feature available in the Google Home app but it mainly limits content playback. It doesn’t stop the kids from controlling smart home devices. In fact, anyone who knows the “Hey Google” wake word and speaks a command can control your smart home devices. That includes any guests in your smart home.
For now, then, Jonathan can’t limit who controls what devices in his house.
However, we don’t know all of the details in this situation. So on the off chance his sons are simply saying “Hey Google, lights out” in their rooms and causing this issue, it’s worth offering a suggestion.
For any Google Home device that’s not associated with a specific room in the mobile app, saying “Hey Google, lights out” will turn off all lights in the home. That’s why we typically set up specific devices for different rooms. And we link Google Home smart speakers to those rooms.
With that set up, only the lights in the same room as the smart display or speaker are turned off. Configuring this is fairly easy. Just go into the Google Home app, find the devices you want in a specific room and add them to the room. This way, if the boys tell Google to turn the lights out in their room, only those lights will go out.
To hear Jonathan’s question, as well as our discussion in full, tune in to the IoT Podcast below:
We had a similar issue at our house because we are three housemates and we didn’t want everything controllable from everywhere.
Depending on the exact details of what you want to do, it is usually possible to set up a single room with its own lights and its own smart speaker with its own accounts. But you may have to add additional devices and you probably lose the ability to control the devices in that room from other places in the Home.
Some people do this because they have an Airbnb space in their home, or because they have a little kid who will tend to turn off everybody’s lights everywhere, or in our case because one of the members of the household has a frequent visitor who Just Doesn’t Get It and says “turn on all lights“. A lot. 😡
Anyway…
There is a limit on exactly which devices you can use because some, in particular some Wi-Fi devices, are automatically discovered by either a Google smart speaker or an Amazon smart speaker on the same Wi-Fi network. So that often leaves out, for example, a Hue bridge for this situation. Or most WiFi switches and bulbs.
But there are some alternatives, particularly for Bluetooth devices.
CYNC BY GE BLUETOOTH PAIRED TO A GOOGLE SMART SPEAKER
If you get Cync by GE (formerly C by GE) Bluetooth bulbs, plugs and remotes and pair them with a Google assistant smart speaker with its own Google account in that room, I would think that would be the least expensive and easiest approach to set up a single room as its own control zone. That Google assistant device would then only control the lights in that room. But again, you wouldn’t be able to control them from any of your other Google speakers, and if you wanted to control them from an app, you would have to sign into the account for that room first. (You could use one of their peel and stick wall switches just outside the room, or one of their handheld remotes, if you want to, for example, give a parent the ability to turn the lights off without going in the room.)
Note that for this to work you would have to limit yourself to their Bluetooth devices, not their Wi-Fi devices, because again, the Wi-Fi devices might get automatically discovered.
That’s a lot of work and Some extra expense, so I don’t know if it would be worth it, but it is a possibility. The Cync by GE line is carried by most Home Depot‘s, so you could pick up a couple devices to try out and return them if it didn’t work the way you wanted.
OR USE TWO WIFI NETWORKS
If you want this option for something like an Airbnb space, if that space has its own Wi-Fi account then that gives you more options because you could limit the smart speaker in that space to that Wi-Fi network. This is actually what we ended up doing because one of our housemates is a serious gamer and he ended up getting his own Internet account so we just connected his lights to that network and solved the visitor problem.
SUMMARY
So as always, it comes down to the details. It’s definitely possible to limit voice control to the lights in one part of the home, but it requires planning and you then almost certainly lose control of those lights from other Smart speakers in the home. But you can set it up so it works the same way as all the other zones in the house, it’s just limited to that zone. So at least it’s intuitive once you get it set up.
And as always, the first rule of home automation applies: “the model number matters.“