Great news for Google Home enthusiasts: Ecobee just added support for the Google Assistant! This means you can now use your Google Home, Google Home Mini, or Google Home app to control your ecobee thermostat using simple voice commands.
Ecobee makes both of our most highly recommended smart thermostats, including our budget-friendly pick for 2017, the ecobee3 lite and the brand new Alexa-integrated ecobee4. We love ecobee’s room sensors and the intuitive touch screen designs, and the addition of voice control – whether it’s through Alexa or Google Assistant – is a natural next-step in the growing home automation space.
This is good news for a couple reasons: one, it means ecobee is not going to be “Alexa exclusive” (which we thought might be the case when the ecobee4 came out with Alexa built right into the hardware) and two, it means ecobee is keeping pace with its primary competitor, Nest, who added Google Assistant support in October 2017.
Linking your ecobee to Google Home
Support for Google Assistant was added for all current-gen ecobee thermostats, including the ecobee4, the ecobee3, and the ecobee3 lite.
Open the Google Home app and go to Add devices.
Choose ecobee and enter your ecobee username and password to authorize it.
Once hooked up, you can start having fun with voice commands!
See the full setup instructions on Ecobee’s site.
Google Assistant commands
You can use “Hey Google” or “Ok Google” to start your commands:
- “Hey Google, what’s the <thermostat name> set to?”
- “Ok Google, set the temperature to <temperature>”
- “Hey Google, increase the temperature in the <thermostat name>” (defaults to 5 degree increase)
- “Hey Google, increase the temperature in the <thermostat name> by <number> degrees”
- “Ok Google, turn on the <thermostat name> schedule”
- Ok Google, what’s the current reading on the <sensor name> sensor?
I think our favorite additions are being able to ask Google to tell us the temperature of a particular sensor and being able to ask Google to raise or lower the temp a certain amount of degrees. The only thing really missing is the ability to ask Google for a humidity reading. We run a humidifier during the winter so we check this frequently. Maybe ecobee will add this ability in the near future!
Get the full list of Google Assistant commands here on Ecobee’s site.
Keeping up with the competition
Ecobee already has a long history of supporting home automation and IoT platforms, including Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s HomeKit, Samsung’s SmartThings, Wink, and IFTTT.
The addition of Google Home comes just in time for the holiday shopping season – we know a lot of Google Home fans out there were disappointed to see Alexa get built in to the ecobee4 with no mention of Google Assistant.
We think the competition between Alexa and Assistant keeps both Amazon and Google on their toes. We have both Google Home and Amazon Alexa in our home and we like seeing what new things they keep rolling out with. When it comes to home automation, we think the more cross-platform integration, the better. It means more options for customers, less risk of getting “silo’d” into a particular ecosystem, and fewer difficulties if you ever change out a piece of hardware.