With Google Home officially coming to Australia soon our interested in Google Home and Google Assistant just went through the roof. When popular wireless equipment manufacturer D-Link announced that they would officially be partnering with Google to bring their mydlink range of Home Automation products to the Google Assistant platform, I was overjoyed.
D-Link have the credibility of their networking brand to base their IoT efforts on. Unlike some other OEMs, they aren’t treating Australia like a second class citizen, with a great range of products localised for the Australian market. D-Link’s offerings include Australian Powerpoints, security sensors, network cameras, alarm sirens and even DVD video recorders for security footage, at this stage we’re not certain which products will be controllable via the Assistant.
I would expect the integration to be similar to other home automation products where a power switch for example, will be treated as a first tier interaction, allowing direct control of it without having to invoke the “mydlink” action. Eg, you should just be able to say turn on the power in my bathroom, and your fan heater will roar to life. Of course you have to link that power switch to the “room” bathroom for this to work, but that’s part of the setup process.
Hopefully, this partnership heralds that D-Link will integrate even more of their products, perhaps even non-IoT related with the Actions on Google platform. At the moment the integration isn’t visible for me on my Pixel or other devices, however, I expect it to show up soon. We’ve reached out to D-Link for more details on the Australian release and may even try and get a few products on the test bench.
