How can I control Home Assistant with Alexa or Google Assistant?
You can control Home Assistant devices with Alexa or Google Assistant by connecting your Home Assistant instance to those voice services, then speaking commands like "Alexa, turn on the lights" or "Ok Google, turn off the AC." Home Assistant's own voice assistant, Assist, is a separate option if you prefer a private, locally running assistant that supports wake words. The right choice depends on whether you already own smart speakers and whether you want voice processing to stay local.
Two ways to get voice control
Home Assistant supports voice control through two distinct paths:
| Path | What it uses | Typical command | Where voice is processed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alexa / Google Assistant | Amazon or Google cloud services | "Alexa, turn on the lights" / "Ok Google, turn off the AC" | Vendor cloud |
| Assist | Home Assistant's built-in voice assistant | Wake word, then a spoken command | Runs on your own hardware |
Alexa and Google Assistant are the fastest route if you already have an Echo or Nest speaker, because you are reusing hardware and accounts you own. Assist is the route to take if privacy and local control matter more to you, since Home Assistant describes it as "private, insanely fast, voice assistant running on affordable hardware."
Connecting Alexa or Google Assistant
The exact setup flow lives in Home Assistant's integration documentation, but the shape of the task is consistent:
- Confirm your Home Assistant instance is reachable — voice services need to talk to your instance, so it must be accessible in the way the integration requires.
- Add the voice integration — Home Assistant exposes your entities to Alexa or Google Assistant through its supported integration.
- Expose the entities you want to control — you choose which lights, switches, climate devices, and scenes the voice assistant can see. Not everything needs to be exposed.
- Link the account — sign in to the voice service so it can discover your exposed devices.
- Test a command — say "Alexa, turn on the lights" or "Ok Google, turn off the AC" and confirm the device responds.
Expected result: the named device changes state, and the voice service reports success.
Common sticking points:
- Devices that are not exposed will not appear to the voice assistant, even if they work fine inside Home Assistant.
- Entity names matter. A device named something cryptic is hard to invoke by voice; rename it to something you would actually say.
- If a command fails, check that the entity is exposed and that the voice account link is still valid.
Using Assist instead
Assist is Home Assistant's own voice assistant. It supports wake words and is designed to run on affordable hardware, which means you can build a voice control setup without routing commands through Amazon or Google.
The trade-off is hardware and setup effort: you need a device to capture voice and run the assistant. Home Assistant's Voice Preview Edition is positioned as "the best way to get started with voice," so that is the natural starting point if you want to try Assist rather than assemble something yourself.
Combining voice with automations
Voice control does not replace Home Assistant's automation engine — it sits alongside it. The same devices you control by voice can also be driven by rules, such as turning on a light when the sun sets or when you arrive home. In practice this means voice is for one-off, on-demand commands, while automations handle the recurring cases you do not want to think about.
Which should you pick?
- Choose Alexa or Google Assistant if you already have those speakers, want the least new hardware, and are comfortable with commands being handled by those cloud services.
- Choose Assist if local control and privacy are the priority, and you are willing to add voice hardware.
- You can run both. Exposing entities to Alexa or Google Assistant does not prevent you from also using Assist.
Home Assistant integrates with over a thousand brands and scans your network for known devices, so whichever voice path you pick, the devices themselves are set up the same way first.