Indigo Domotics

First I want to say THANK YOU for creating Homebridge Buddy. Once I read through some of the docs on setup and wrapped my mind around the concepts it I now have it working.

I also have to say I find Siri with Homebridge much more responsive than Alexa.

Thats all I have.

reugster wrote:

I also have to say I find Siri with Homebridge much more responsive than Alexa.

I love this observation, though I have no intention of letting Alexa in my house. Is it true that Alexa commands have to be exact? That they have to match an installed "skill"?

reugster wrote:

First I want to say THANK YOU for creating Homebridge Buddy. Once I read through some of the docs on setup and wrapped my mind around the concepts it I now have it working.

I also have to say I find Siri with Homebridge much more responsive than Alexa.

Thats all I have.

I'm humbled, thank you.

Different Computers wrote:

reugster wrote:

I also have to say I find Siri with Homebridge much more responsive than Alexa.

I love this observation, though I have no intention of letting Alexa in my house. Is it true that Alexa commands have to be exact? That they have to match an installed "skill"?

I use Alexa only as a stop-gap until Apple's speaker is ready to go, as I have far more confidence in Apple's privacy policy and commitment to user privacy than I do Google or Amazon. That being said, if you use the Hue Bridge you use it like Siri "Alexa, turn off lamp" so it's pretty similar. I find Alexa to be tons slower though, since about October I find myself having to tell her to do things two and three times or she'll complain that there's some problem preventing her from using the home automation. I just upgraded my echo to see if that helps and it doesn't so it's going back.

You don't have to add a Skill for home control since Alexa natively uses Hue and we have the AlexaHueBridge so you dont have to do that rigamarole. You still have to be exact, as far as i can tell as to the device name you are trying to control. I do find that you have more features with home bridge (i guess by design) since you aren't shoehorning your devices in as Hue devices. I.e. in Homebridge a lock is a lock and not an On/Off device.
I find home bridge much more elegant.

I do find myself repeating commands more often with Alexa too

reugster wrote:

I find home bridge much more elegant.

Me too. And it's going to get a LOT more so. I'm working on a new generation of the product that will be much more streamlined and open up 40+ more device types and eliminate the need for "treat as". I hope to release an alpha or beta in the coming weeks for those that want to give it a shot. HBB will still be fully intact as this will become an entirely new plugin, but I'm excited as I see it starting to shape up. Super excited.

reugster wrote:

I.e. in Homebridge a lock is a lock and not an On/Off device.

I refuse to add any security device to Alexa, she doesn't do anything to protect you. At least Siri will require a passcode so that an intruder cannot yell "Hey Siri, lock the front door" (as happened early in release), you put that on Alexa and anyone can yell at your house to get access.

I think thats mainly due to the limitations of how Alexa is interfaced but I agree, i do like Apples security policies overall compared to other voice systems.


I am interested in your future developments

I'll take the contrary view: I like Alexa much better. Messing with Homebridge and HomeKit's peculiarities has just turned me off. I find Alexa fast and responsive, at least through the bridge.

However: the Alexa bridge seems to be slowly decaying over time as Amazon makes underlying changes (with newer Echo devices). We're working on the backend plumbing to make doing a real Alexa Skill possible (as well as other integrations like Google Home) while maintaining security and privacy. The problem will be that once we get all that done, we'll end up with a solution that is in fact somewhat slower by it's very nature. And that's because Amazon requires skills to be run in the cloud and smart home skills can only communicate with cloud-based services. So everything you do/say will have to go through the cloud then to your Indigo Server. The current bridge is built on reverse engineering their direct integration from the Echo* to local smarthome devices on the same network.

So, while I like Alexa much better now, that may not be the case in the future when the bridge no longer works and the commands to the native skill (when it becomes available) has to travel through the cloud.

Of course, the same "decaying" effect we see with the Alexa bridge plugin is also possible (and, in my estimation, somewhat likely) as Homebridge is also based on reverse-engineering what's going on with HomeKit. Apple could do what they did with AppleTVs and encrypt communication in such a way as to make it impossible to reverse engineer. This would disable Homebridge and therefore Indigo's ability to pretend to be HomeKit devices.

jay (support) wrote:

I'll take the contrary view

I know you have always been solidly in Amazons court when it comes to voice assistants and now that it's available on their app on my phone I do give it far more credit, but until it has the flexibility of Siri I'm not fully there. Right now every device is a white dimmer, whereas with Homebridge it can be any device that HomeKit wants (only 8 or so now but the next gen currently in Alpha supports ALL HomeKit device types) makes it more appealing to me.

Your wish has been granted!!

http://macdailynews.com/2018/01/23/appl ... uary-26th/


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Coolcaper wrote:

Your wish has been granted!!

http://macdailynews.com/2018/01/23/appl ... uary-26th/

Great, I'll go take a second mortgage...

jay (support) wrote:

Great, I'll go take a second mortgage...

LMAO! It's funny, in the midst of Echo being slow as molasses and not working for HA half the time I bought the new 2nd Gen and, guess what, same thing. I told the wife "I'm just going to return this, I'll use this and a third of the Apple HomePod is paid for". Yup. Always risky being an early adopter (as I realize the iPhone X will be totally redone this year, the AirPods I got on day 1 are getting redone this year, HomePod likely will have some issues and get redone next year, brand new iPad from December will be replaced this year), I'm kind of used to it!

@ C4W - we have to buy them! Otherwise we won't get a better version the next year.. LOL

Still gonna hurt though. But hey if it sounds good; Sonos' aren't cheap, and an Airplay/AppleTV to a "stereo" ain't either. Sure we don't upgrade speakers often, or amps.. but still.

Looking forward to the new version of HBB - and I will cry if Apple cuts us off like the AppleTV.

Thanks guys!

jay (support) wrote:

Coolcaper wrote:

Your wish has been granted!!

http://macdailynews.com/2018/01/23/appl ... uary-26th/

Great, I'll go take a second mortgage...

LMAO!!!

Fishysan wrote:

Looking forward to the new version of HBB - and I will cry if Apple cuts us off like the AppleTV.

It's coming together quite nicely! I don't think Apple will "cut off" HomeKit, there are a lot of folks with a lot invested in it and it benefits Apple when 3rd party developers "hack" together solutions like the MANY solutions using Homebridge (from Vera to Control to Indigo and everything in between).