White series fav button in Google Home

So I’m setting up a bunch of White 2-1, and it looks like the favorite button is registered maybe twice for each switch?

I realize I screwed up by not renaming them 1 at a time as I commisioned them, but here we are xD

it looks like I can’t add them as a trigger to a Google home routine, so I’m not actually sure how to use them.

But the question is, why are there SO MANY! Did something go wrong during commissioning? Or are there supposed to be 2 per switch?

It could be(guessing here) one button for the light switch and the other for the LED bar.

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Each switch already had a “switch” component, which is the actual switch, and a “light” component that is the LED Bar

Here’s what is actually happening …

The Inovelli device includes 3 endpoints needed for button tapping. In the language of the Matter standard, these are referred to as “Generic Switch” endpoints. Google, however, does not implement the Matter generic switch / button tapping part of the standard. Logically, Google Home should just do nothing when it encounters these and not create any device icons. But, in a startling example of horrible interface implementation, Google instead creates these useless non-functioning switch device icons. They won’t cause any harm, but they just don’t do anything. This is not just a problem with Inovelli, but with any device that you pair with Google Home that supports Matter button tapping features. So, rather than spending time renaming these useless icons, you might want to create a “dummy” room (e.g., a room named “Unsupported Features” or “Google Please Fix This”, or whatever), and move all these endpoints to that room to hide them.

Here’s the Google docs on the Matter device types they support. As you’ll see, no mention of the “Generic Switch”: Supported devices  |  Matter  |  Google Home Developers

The Inovelli device also includes an endpoint that is used for Matter bindings. That too is unsupported by Google and creates another dummy endpoint.

Thus, for every switch you add, you get 4 non-functioning useless switch devices that display in Google Home along with the 2 that actually work. Hopefully, Google will start hearing complaints about this and fix their issues.

Note that if you have HomeAssistant, the solution to this is to pair the device to HomeAssistant, and then just use the HomeAssistant Matterbridge add-on to bridge back to Google Home, but bridge back only the light control endpoints.

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And to be clear, no, this isn’t a sign of a commissioning issue and is not an indicator that something went wrong during commissioning. Its a major Google Home user interface fail which Google has to address. Probably going to take a few thousand customer complaints being sent to them for them to notice!

Edit: The unusable VTM31-SN parameters are now visible as parameters and possibly usable in Google home. They are still ungrouped from the switches, but it is progress. Parameters showing are “Smart bulb mode”, “Relay”, “dimming speed”, and “dimming Edge”. Note: May have to be in Public preview to see.