Want to control almost any TV, DVD or other infrared device by voice ? If your device is not a newer model that offers voice assistance, you can add voice control by use of a univeral remote like the Broadlink Mini3 IR Control Hub.
These devices operate like your normal wand remotes with two key differences:
- Rather than having a directed beam of infrared which you must point at your device, they flood the room with infrared light so they reach all of the devices in the room that are within a reasonable distance and angle from the universal remote.
- They are Wifi enabled and respond to commands you issue over your network.
The simplest way of using the universal remote is to simply follow the manufacturer’s instructions and use the mobile software offered by the manufacturer. However, this will involve using the manufacturer’s cloud account which can expose your home network to vulnerabilities.
The more secure but more complicated approach which I have done is to ditch the manufacturer’s mobile app and cloud account and use Home Assistant installed on a Raspberry Pi (model 3 or higher). The steps are too long to list here, but in short, they involve using an IF This Then That (IFTTT) Google Assistant or Alexa applet to issue a command through Home Assistant to trigger a URL call to your Broadlink universal remote using the Home Assistant broadlink plugin. You will also need to setup a DuckDNS account and a secure SSL connection to your Raspberry Pi. The Home Assistant will allow you to setup the broadlink plugin to issue either one command (e.g., to turn the TV on), or several in a series (e.g., turn the TV on and switch to a particular channel).
Below are two YouTube videos explaining most of the steps other than the IFTTT setup (Note that you only need to listen to the first 11 minutes for the first video for the infrared setup, the remainder is not relevant):
To set up voice commands using IFTTT, use the Google Home Assistant applet to cause a voice command “E.g., Turn on TV” to fetch the DuckDNS URL containing your Home Assistant broadlink command.
Lastly do you have a Roku or Roku enabled TV like the TCL Roku series but it’s not voice enabled ? You can ditch the Univeral Remote entirely as well as the Home Assistant setup and just have the IFTTT Google Assistant applet recipe issue the Roku API url command directly to the Roku device’s API. Much simpler and more reliable!
