Accessing @Sigfox data through Google Assistant

Preface

Sigfox is the initiator of the 0G network and the world’s leading Internet of Things service provider. Its global network allows millions of devices to connect to the Internet, in a straightforward way, while consuming as little energy as possible. Sigfox unique approach to device-to-cloud communications addresses the three greatest barriers to global IoT adoption: cost, energy consumption and global scalability.

Google Cloud Platform is a suite of public cloud computing services that runs on Google hardware infrastructure. Alongside a set of management tools, it provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, storage & database, networking, big data and machine learning.

Introduction

Google Cloud Platform is now officially integrated with Sigfox Cloud. Basically, it means that it is possible to push any data generated by Sigfox enabled devices up to Google Cloud Platform.

This paper highlights how to leverage on this integration by giving users new ways to interact with this data such as voice apps and chatbots, powered by AI. Google Assistant being one of them among others.

Here the goal is to get the temperature or humidity measured by a Sens’it.

Overview

Write

1. Sigfox devices send data over Sigfox 0G network.
2. Sigfox Cloud Integration automatically publishes the device data to a Cloud Pub/Sub topic in a predefined GCP instance.
3. The data is streamed in real-time to BigQuery using a specific Cloud Function.

All credits to Markku Lepisto for the related integration & tutorials.

Read

1. The user makes a request to the Google Home, which is forwarded to Google Assistant that uses Actions on Google to transcribe the speech to text.
2. Dialogflow identifies the inputs, query the corresponding BigQuery table and get the raw data. Then it filters the output to match with what was requested by the user.
3. The answer is returned to Google Assistant that forward it to the Google Home.

The complete code and documentation can be found here on Github.

Results

Here below is the last row of the Sens’it BigQuery table. The temperature and humidity values are respectively 24.875 and 52.0.

And here are some screenshots of the Sigfox chatbot conversation:

Use-cases examples

What is the air quality today in Paris?

Is there a free parking spot around? If yes, can you take me there?

What was the latest position of my keys?

Is there many people queuing up at the doctor right now?

…

More information on Sigfox Build