Somfy Garage Door in Google Home: Setup and Car Commands

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My car sits nose to the garage on a short sloped driveway, and for two years the opening ritual was a plastic Somfy remote clipped to the sun visor. It worked. It also landed in the footwell about once a month, usually in the rain. So when the TaHoma hub in the utility room picked up proper support for gates and garage doors, wiring the door into Google Home went straight to the top of my list.

Bottom line: Somfy TaHoma hands a garage door to Google Home through a normal account link that takes about ten minutes. Google then treats the door as a secure device and demands a spoken PIN before it opens. That PIN is also the catch: Gemini, unlike the old Assistant, refuses PIN-gated commands outright, which breaks the exact use case most people want, opening the door from the car.

This guide covers the whole chain: pairing the motor, linking the accounts, setting the code, the commands that work, and the workarounds for the car. I have kept the awkward parts in rather than pretending the setup is frictionless.

What You Need Before You Touch the App

Four things, and one of them decides how much of this actually works.

• A TaHoma hub. The current TaHoma switch and the TaHoma Rail-DIN both do this. Older TaHoma boxes work too, provided the firmware is current.
• A Somfy garage motor on io-homecontrol: Dexxo Smart io, Dexxo Compact io, Dexxo Pro io or Serenia io. BFT io receivers can bring a non-Somfy motor into the same system.
• A Somfy account that owns the hub, with the password to hand.
• The Google Home app on a phone signed into the Google account your car uses. Different account in the car means no devices in the car.

io or RTS Decides How Much of This Works

Somfy sells two radio families, and the difference matters more here than it does on blinds. RTS is one way. The hub shouts a command into the air and never hears back, so the position shown in the app is a guess. io-homecontrol is two way, which means the motor reports what it actually did and the hub knows whether the door is open, closed or stuck halfway.

Why care? Because that single difference decides whether Google can answer "is the garage door open?" and whether any automation can safely close the door. Closing a door whose position you are guessing at is how people flatten bicycles. If your motor is RTS only, you can still send open and close, but treat the state as unknown and never automate the close.

Pairing the Door with TaHoma

Do this first. Google can only see what TaHoma already sees.

In the TaHoma app, add equipment, pick the garage door category, and follow the pairing sequence printed in the motor manual. On the Dexxo range it usually means a short press on the programming button until the motor jogs. The door will move a few centimetres to confirm. If nothing moves, the motor is out of pairing mode, not out of range, and you start the sequence again.

Then rename it. This step gets skipped and it shouldn't. Whatever you type here becomes the phrase you say out loud for the next five years, and Google repeats it back to you every time. Call it garage door. Don't call it Dexxo Smart 800 io, however satisfying that feels in the app.

Linking TaHoma to Google Home

The link itself is a standard cloud-to-cloud connection with no hidden steps.

1. Open the Google Home app and add a device.
2. Choose the works with Google list rather than the new-device flow. This trips people up, because a TaHoma hub is not a device Google discovers on your WiFi.
3. Search for Somfy TaHoma and pick it.
4. Sign in with the Somfy account that owns the hub, then approve the permission screen.
5. Wait. Your shutters, blinds, lights and now the garage door arrive as separate devices.
6. Put the garage door in a room. Room assignment is what makes shorter commands resolve later.

If the shutters appear and the garage door doesn't, the problem is upstream in TaHoma, not in Google. Check the door is visible in the TaHoma app first, then unlink and relink the account. A relink re-runs discovery, which is the only reliable way to pull in a device added after the original link.

Why Google Demands a PIN

Google puts garage doors, gates and locks in a separate class from lamps. Opening one needs a spoken code. Closing one usually doesn't, on the reasonable theory that a stranger shouting through your letterbox has no interest in shutting your door for you.

The prompt itself comes from Google, not Somfy, and Somfy's own compatibility page for Google Assistant and TaHoma says as much: the access category carries a security code note, and the worked example is a garage door that opens after the code is given.

There is one error message worth memorising. If Google answers with "this action requires a security code, but it hasn't been set up in your device's app", nothing is broken. The code simply doesn't exist yet on either side of the link. Repeating the command more slowly, which is what everyone tries, achieves nothing.

The Gemini Problem Nobody Mentions

Here's the part that turns a ten minute setup into an evening.

Classic Google Assistant handled secure devices properly. You said open the garage door, it asked for the code, you said four digits, the door moved. Gemini, which now answers on a great many phones and inside Android Auto, does not do this. Ask it to open a PIN-protected device and it tells you it can't control devices that require a PIN, then offers to open the Google Home app for you. In the kitchen that's mildly annoying. At 50 km/h with the driveway approaching, it's useless.

This isn't an exotic edge case. It's been reported repeatedly on the Android Auto and Gemini support forums since the rollout, and it hits every brand equally, Somfy, Chamberlain, ismartgate, anything Google classes as an openable device.

Commands That Actually Work

Once the door is linked and named, these are the phrases worth learning. The PIN column is the one to read carefully.

Scenes deserve a note of their own, because Somfy exposes TaHoma scenarios to Google as scenes and Google does not treat a scene as a secure device.

Getting It To Work From the Car

Four approaches, ranked by how well they hold up in daily use.

Arrival automation, no voice at all. The best version of this feature is the one where you say nothing. TaHoma geofencing, or a Google Home routine tied to arriving home, opens the door as you turn into the street. No PIN, no assistant, no talking to your dashboard. Set the radius generously, because a tight geofence fires when you are already parked.

A scene instead of a device. Build a TaHoma scenario whose only action is opening the garage, call it something you would actually say, and trigger that by voice. Because Google sees a scene rather than an openable device, no PIN is demanded and Gemini runs it happily. Understand the trade you are making: you have just removed the code that stopped a voice from outside the house opening your garage. On a hub speaker indoors that's a fair trade. On a phone that answers to any voice, it isn't.

Keep classic Assistant where you still can. Some phones and head units still fall back to the old Assistant, which handles the PIN prompt properly. Treat this as borrowed time rather than a plan.

Keep the remote. I am not going to pretend otherwise: the Keygo on the visor still beats every option above. It works with no internet, no cloud, no account link and no code, and it responds in a fraction of a second because it talks straight to the motor. Voice control is the convenience layer, not the replacement.

The Automation I Ended Up Using

Arrival opens, but nothing automatic closes. The door closes on a voice command or a tap in the app, always with eyes on it. Somfy's io feedback means the app can tell me the door is still open twenty minutes later, and that notification has caught me twice. A guessing RTS setup would have caught me never.

Troubleshooting the Usual Failures

• Door missing in Google Home. Confirm it exists in TaHoma, then unlink and relink the Somfy account to re-run discovery.
• Google says the security code isn't set up. The code was never created. Set it, then test on a speaker before testing in the car.
• Gemini refuses to open anything. Expected behaviour, not a fault. Use a scene or an arrival automation.
• State is always unknown. Your motor is RTS. No setting fixes that, only an io motor or an io receiver does.
• Command works at home, fails in the car. The car is signed into a different Google account, or the head unit is running Gemini while the phone is not.
• Everything is slow. Two cloud hops each way. A few seconds is normal, and a hub reboot won't change the physics.

Would I Set It Up Again?

Yes, but for the arrival automation rather than the voice command. Speaking a four digit code out loud, in a car, with the window down, to open the door of the building where I keep everything I own, was never going to be the future I wanted. The version that earns its keep is the silent one: I turn into the street, the door is already moving, and the only thing I had to remember was to bring the car.

If you are still choosing hardware, the Alexa and Google Assistant comparison is worth reading first, because the secure-device rules differ between the two, and so does the tolerance for talking to your garage.