One could only miss the newest tech developments when living under a stone: Voice assistants are getting more and more popular. Smart home software and brokers for automating common tasks and connecting different devices are gaining significance, too.
So why not link them together? Only a small subset of the devices you own can be controlled natively with voice assistants (like Google Home or Alexa). Currently, you need to rely on manufacturers of smart home devices to implement support for them. When using automation software, e.g. Home Assistant, Domoticz or OpenHAB, things get even more complicated.
gBridge addresses these issues! It is a single, unified solution that enables any smart home device or software to be controlled using smart speakers. It connects to the voice assistant manufacturers, abstracts and converts the occuring messages and finally provides an open and well documented interface that can be integrated in your application.
How it worksIt's magic 😉. Well, it's almost magic - at a first glance.
Manufacturers of smart home speakers, in particular Amazon and Google for the moment, provide some sort of APIs for integrating own devices. They vary a lot, are usually hard to comprehend, meticulous to implement; they require extensive project configuration, a proper network setup and force you to undergo a hard validation process.
gBridge ist the one solution that takes this burden off your shoulders. The data from the different interface is converted to abstract messages.
Finally, gBridge hosts MQTT servers. In case you didn't know: MQTT, the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol is an open standard for machine-to-machine communication. The data from the proprietary interfaces is made available via MQTT messages. And, there's the point: I can honestly say that I don't know a single smart home software that does not support MQTT.
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