I was pleasantly surprised with how smooth and responsive this is, I was worried it would be too slow but actually works really well. I was reluctant to setup a web service to trigger home automation tasks. I'd rather keep it all on my home automation server so i have more control and less reliance on external services. But it seems almost unavoidable as most voice assistants use a web service of some kind to integrate features, and at the very least for the natural language processing and voice recognition.
Anyway I followed the simple instructions here
Setting up all the IFTTT applets is a littel tedious but otherwise its a breeze.
If your not familiar with port forwarding on your router that might be a sticking point too
So I can now ask
"Hey google, Kodi Play the next episode of ...."
which then starts the latest episode of the series I asked for.
I can also ask for a specific season and episode.
I can pause stop and resume with simple commands like
"Hey google, Pause Kodi", or "Hey Google Stop Kodi"
Movies can be started too and you can even have it skip forward by a designated number of seconds.
It works well and is pretty smooth. As with any IFTTT applet there is a slight delay before its executed (~ 3 seconds) but with voice control you kind of expect that. If i was flipping a light switch id be pissed of if it took 3 seconds to turn on, but waiting for a response for a voice command is totally acceptable.
I had also previously used tasker autovoice and yatse remote to do this . SO although I am still using as almost as many parts at least it doesn't rely on my phone being in the house and on for it to work.
Does anyone else use their google home or Alexa to control Kodi?