I was excited about Google Home’sscript editor feature: as mysmart home collectionhas ballooned, the idea of more context-dependent automations with more of my devices working together in novel ways (changing thermostat settings based on the season! turning on the lights when the front door opens after sunset!) has gotten to be very appealing. When I finally tried whipping up my own automation scripts, though, I found it was more technical than I’d expected and gave it up the same afternoon, vowing to someday figure it out. I never did.
So I wasreallyexcited at the opportunity to try Google’snew AI-powered Help me script feature, which aims to create functional smart home automation scripts based on plain, completely non-technical prompts. Tell it what you want to happen and when, and in a couple of seconds, it spits out a fully formed automation script for you to paste into the editor. It’s a killer idea, and when it works, it’s great. But based on my early experience with Help me script, it’s fiddly right now — so much so, I don’t think I’ll have much use for it in its current state.
What is Help me script?
Help me script is a new addition to the Google Home web interface, rolling out today. It’s an add-on for Google Home’s existing script editor. The idea is that you describe a conditional smart home automation in plain English — something like, “turn off all the lights an hour after sunrise” or “lock the front door at 10 PM” — and in return, Help me script creates script text that you can then copy and paste into the editor field.
Given how technical crafting these scripts by hand can be, this AI-powered automation should be a godsend for anyone who wants to do more with their Google Home-compatible kit, but doesn’t want to read a bunch of dry tutorials to do it.
Is Help me script any good?
I want to preface my impressions here with the disclaimer that I haven’t had much time with Help me script before its release — all told, I’ve probably played with it for a couple of hours. Based on that time with it, though, I’m not terribly impressed.
I’ve got more than a dozen smart lights and various other connected odds and ends synced with Google Home; controlling these devices through the Google Home app or by voice using the Google Assistant typically works well enough that I don’t think about it. For some reason, though, Help me script has difficulty identifying many of my devices in ways that the Google Home script editor can understand.
Help me script has regularly spat out script text that references devices by names that make sense both to me as a human and to the Google Assistant on my smart speakers (names like “Light - Upstairs Hall”), but that cause errors when plugged into the script editor interface. It also seems to struggle with groups of devices.
This is not the effortless, AI-assisted process I’d hoped for.
Entering a prompt that involves controlling all the lights in a given room already defined in Google Home only works sometimes. Help me script wrote a working script that turns on all the lights in my living room when the front door opens, but adding the condition that that should only happenat nightresulted in a script that turned on one lamp in my bedroom instead. Structuring the prompt differently got it to work, but that “turn on the living room lights when the front door opens after 10pm” and “when the front door opens after 10pm, turn on the living room lights” result in very different script outputs seems like an issue to me.
Trying to control devices across the entire house also doesn’t seem to work very well. One of the sample scripts recommended, “Turn on all the lights in the house at sunset,” outputs script text that, for some reason, only controls a handful of the lights in my house — frustrating, especially when telling the Google Assistant to “turn on all the lights” does reliably control the entire home for me. The script also includes a device name that causes a validation error, meaning it doesn’t work at all without some manual touching up.
In trying various prompts that involve the open-close sensor on my front door (do this when the door opens, do that when it closes), Help me script’s output sometimes included references to smart locks, which I don’t own. I can see how a large language model could get confused around similar concepts — doors and locks go together. But I’d expect script output to include only devices associated with my Google Home account — something so obvious I didn’t expect I’d have to say it.
‘This is an experimental feature’
Google notes in Help me script that it’s “experimental,” and that you shouldn’t use it for “security-critical use cases.” Even if that’s at odds with Help me script’s sample automation to “Lock the front door at night,” it seems like sound advice. I’ve had a handful of Help me script prompts create automation scripts that work flawlessly, but generally only for simple automations that could have been set up in the Google Home app without any scripting involved.
Creating more complex automations, or even relatively simple ones involving multiple devices, seems considerably less frictionless, and your Help me script prompts can turn out differently depending on how you phrase them, even with different inputs that obviously (to a human, anyway) mean the same thing.
I’m still bullish on the concept, though. Telling your smart home in plain language how you want it to work feels like a very futuristic idea, and I’m excited about where Help me script could be headed. Right now, it doesn’t quite feel ready for prime time — but it’s early days, and Help me script will presumably get better over time. I’m excited to keep an eye on it as it develops.
