Integration with Google Home / Google Assistant - Now available for general use

[Gol4]

Building on our Amazon Alexa Skill (EV Car / My Tesla), we have now added support for Google Home and Google Assistant. This allows you to control and communicate with your Tesla with no additional software to install. Support for Google Assistant is particularly exciting since it can be used from your phone from practically anywhere.

To get started, follow these steps:

Google Assistant on iPhone/iPad:

• Open the Google Assistant app.
• Say "Talk to EV Car".
• You will see a card that prompts you to link to you Tesla Account.
• Once linked, say "Talk to EV Car" again.
• (Your spoken text might be recognized as "evie car" which is fine. You can also try to use the keyboard to enter the text directly)

Android Running 6.0+ (Most Android phones released in the last couple of years)

• Say "Ok Google, talk to EV Car"
• OR Hold the home button for a couple of seconds and Say "Talk to EV Car".
• You will see a card that prompts you to link to you Tesla Account.
• Once linked, say "Talk to EV Car" again.
• (Your spoken text might be recognized as "evie car" which is fine. You can also try to use the keyboard to enter the text directly)

Google Home (Smart Speaker):

• Say "Talk to EV Car".
• You should get a prompt that EV Car is not yet linked.
• Open the Google Home app on your phone.
• You will see a card that prompts you to link to you Tesla Account.
• Once linked, go back to the Google Home device and say "Talk to EV Car".

To link account, enter your Tesla Account email/password OR if you already have a token, just enter that instead. The email/password is only used to generate a token and is not stored anywhere.

Please treat this as Beta software. While this has been tested for the last month or so, there might be some corner cases that might need to be handled better. Google has also made recent changes to their infrastructure and there are certain scenarios that they still need to address. Please provide all feedback and suggestions on this forum.

Google Home in action (YouTube):

Direct link to the Google Action: https://assistant.google.com/services/a/id/5a33fba4f93f74bc/

Here are some things you can say:

get charge status
get car status
get climate status
get location
turn climate on
warm up my car
cool my car
set driver temperature to 72
set passenger side to 73
start charging
stop charging
honk the horn
flash lights
turn climate off
stop climate
stop heating
stop cooling
how warm is my car
how cold is my car
dude where's my car
get ready to take off
go into hyperdrive
how far can I drive
how far can I go
whats your name
switch cars
set charge limit to 85 percent
start charging to 90 percent
whats the charge limit
lock the car
unlock the car

New commands added November 2019:
vent windows
close windows
open charge port
close charge port
trigger homelink
activate homelink
​

 

[Airhawker]

Awesome!

 

[animorph]

Tried it out on Android, very cool!

 

[evp]

On my Android phone, the "Link EV car to Google" button just flashes the screen and doesn't go anywhere.

 

[ecarfan]

• Open the Google Assistant app.

• Say "Talk to EV Car".

• You will see a card that prompts you to link to you Tesla Account.

• When you enter your Tesla username and password, how is that data handled by the app? Is it encrypted? Is it saved anywhere, even temporarily?

I do not use Google Assistant on my iPhone, so am not familiar with it.

Thank you.

 

[Gol4]

On my Android phone, the "Link EV car to Google" button just flashes the screen and doesn't go anywhere.

Here are some things you can try:
- "Clear Cache" for the Google App. Settings -> Apps -> Google App -> Storage -> Clear Cache
- Check if you can open or link other Actions in Google Assistant

Which phone are you using? This has so far been tested on Samsung S8, LG G5, LG G4.

 

[Gol4]

• When you enter your Tesla username and password, how is that data handled by the app? Is it encrypted? Is it saved anywhere, even temporarily?

I do not use Google Assistant on my iPhone, so am not familiar with it.

Thank you.

The username and password are submitted via a standard secure http link to a AWS server. The AWS server in turn submits it to Tesla for generating a token. The username and password are not stored anywhere at anytime.

Broadly speaking, Google Assistant is like Siri. Its trying to take on functionality of both Siri and Amazon Alexa.

 

[dedicatedtek]

Great work !

 

[ABC2D]

Nice! Two questions:
1. can "EV car" be changed to something else? Tesla?
2. is there other way to generate the security token outside of the app?

 

[Max*]

On my Android phone, the "Link EV car to Google" button just flashes the screen and doesn't go anywhere.

Same. On the Samsung S8.

I'll try clearing cache.



On the Google Home it does link.

 

[golfnut]

Love it! Works so well. Thanks!

 

[ABC2D]

Nice! Two questions:
1. can "EV car" be changed to something else? Tesla?
2. is there other way to generate the security token outside of the app?

@Gol4 - while searching for "how to generate Tesla token" I run into your Alexa thread, and read it through. So, is Google, the same as Amazon, not allowing to use just Tesla? Is "My Tesla" allowed?

 

[Gol4]

Same. On the Samsung S8.

I'll try clearing cache.

On the Google Home it does link.

Linking is only required once per google account. So if you have linked through Google Home, it should just work on the S8 without asking to link again.

 

[Gol4]

@Gol4 - while searching for "how to generate Tesla token" I run into your Alexa thread, and read it through. So, is Google, the same as Amazon, not allowing to use just Tesla? Is "My Tesla" allowed?

Yes, Google has stricter rules than Amazon. They would not allow using "Tesla" in the name or invocation term. They also have the minimum-two-word restriction and "my" cannot be one of the words.

FYI regarding token generation, if you are technically hands on, there is a command line tool on Github that can generate tokens. Also, my app internally provides a web interface which can used for generating tokens. PM me if interested and I'll provide the URL.

 

[evp]

Here are some things you can try:
- "Clear Cache" for the Google App. Settings -> Apps -> Google App -> Storage -> Clear Cache
- Check if you can open or link other Actions in Google Assistant

Which phone are you using? This has so far been tested on Samsung S8, LG G5, LG G4.

Clear Cache has no effect. Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

 

[Gol4]

Clear Cache has no effect. Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

Shooting in the dark here but try and loading another app (action) that requires linking and see if that page opens up. That'll help us identify if the problem is specific to this particular action or general Google Action issue. To get to the actions directory, click on the blue icon on the top right and then look for some other action the requires linking.

Also make sure that the Google App and Google Play Services are updated to the latest version.

 

[Teslita]

New member here...
... sorry for the ''trivial'' question:
Will this work with only the Google Assistant, or is somehow tied to the Google Home hardware?
Thanks ;

 

[Gol4]

New member here...
... sorry for the ''trivial'' question:
Will this work with only the Google Assistant, or is somehow tied to the Google Home hardware?
Thanks ;

Welcome to the forums. Thats a good question as it might be confusing to other users too.
Google Home is not required. This should work on any iPhone or Android phone running a recent version of operating system.
Just go to the Google Assistant app and say "talk to EV car". See the original post for more details.

 

[Max*]

Awesome job, I sincerely thank you.

Two questions:
1. Can this in any way link to Google's voice recognition? I don't want someone, besides me, saying "unlock car" and the car actually unlocking....
2. Can it exit more gracefully? When I say something stupid (i.e. Not on the supported list of commands), instead of it telling me "Sorry, that's not supported, would you like to try again?" It tells me "Error communicating with car" and exits.

 

[Gol4]

Awesome job, I sincerely thank you.

Two questions:
1. Can this in any way link to Google's voice recognition? I don't want someone, besides me, saying "unlock car" and the car actually unlocking....
2. Can it exit more gracefully? When I say something stupid (i.e. Not on the supported list of commands), instead of it telling me "Sorry, that's not supported, would you like to try again?" It tells me "Error communicating with car" and exits.

Thanks for your feedback.

1. Are you talking about the multiuser feature of Google Home? That is fairly new. I would have to do some research on that. In general, this is something I've thought about quite a bit. It can be a security issue. On the other hand though, I find it quite useful. Amazon just plainly disallows unlocking of any kind of doors so it had to disabled in the Amazon skill. Google does prohibit unlocking of house doors but they haven't said anything about car doors yet. I won't be surprised if they update that policy.

2. That error message is a catch all in case a specific error is not handled. Looking at the logs, it seems like errors are happening while setting climate temperature. I have added some more checks for that and updated the backend. If you still see the same error, please send me the spoken command that caused it.