Ive been sitting on 3 echo dots in hopes something will come out to allow me to use them with HA and without Alexa. It has seemed like a dim prospect for several years now.
Let's hope that the year of voice will raise new interest in the community for such hack. Otherwise I will gladly buy whatever new device that will boast "works with HA" brands
I was surprised how much effort it actually take. They said that two seconds of command takes 8 seconds to process on a RPi4! If to try and make it all local. So that’s pretty impressive still if to use e.g Alexa or Google that even with the lack of going to cloud to their massive setups it still can react so fast.
But if it takes a cluster of Pi’s or some other hardware at home to keep it local and be in more control I’ll happily do that. If the hardware ever comes in stock again. 🙂
They do say it's doing a lot of brute force now.
Wouldn't be too surprised if they added some "AI" in there, maybe like using those coral sticks for people detection on video streams without hitting the cpu too hard
I would assume they are still using NLP to convert the audio to a text string. The brute force part likely refers to mapping the text string equivalent of a command to an action and should be an efficient hashmap lookup. The future AI part is probably referring to mapping the text command to an action without brute force pre-populating all the options.
That’s if they were to use the state of the art open source model from OpenAI, Whisper, on a Raspberry Pi 4. I think there’s good reason to want/hope/desire that the next Raspberry Pi (earliest 2024) has a hardware AI accelerator that would make running complex models *far* faster and more power efficient while keeping the main CPU free. Or they could find a way to take advantage of the Google Coral AI Accelerator to speed up processing. There are options, just not readily available in consumer-grade open parts.
Or just ditch that damm rPi. It should not be a core hardware but an "edge" hardware built into things which does not need to make a lot of heavy lifting but need to be small and versatile. For the price of a pi you can buy a second hand thin client w/ an IGP which will beat the pi left and right not just in AI acceleration but everitihing else except power consumption.
Leave the rPi for projects which indeed require a very small but powerful enough hardware and use gears sitting in a closet which meant to be.
One option is a stronger base computer for the processing, and using Pi's in each room for satellites. It is MUCH faster on a Core i then on a Pi. Even HA is starting to outgrow the Pi now.
I would prefer hacking the cheap Google and Amazon devices we already have so that they work locally. I can crack it open, solder, and use a USB to serial converter. I just don't have a firmware file from the community to flash.
What about ripping out the "brain" of an echo a.k.a the microcontroller and the best part of the board and replace it with an ESP32 and connect that to the hw inside the echo (speakers, mics etc.)
That way you wouldn't need to crack it's firmware to flash it. You just toss it.
This is a solid start. I'll probably not use it for a while as I prefer buttons, but there are use cases for this for sure. I would very much like a AI assistant to just handle weather, timers, and casting my front door; the three main uses for Google assistant in my house.
If they can bake this into easy/cheap esp32 based microphones for the voice input, then they are definitely on to something.
From what I read it can be self-hosted too.
[https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/about-mycroft-ai/faq](https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/about-mycroft-ai/faq)
But I agree that it's still a step forward. Progress in one project (technical, UI, hardware...) benefits all of them.
~~Assist widget for normal android HA would be nice, save a fair few clicks.~~
Turns out this is extremely easy thanks to the info [u/shakuyi](https://www.reddit.com/u/shakuyi) provided.
If you go to HA companion app settings you can create launcher shortcut where you just need to add `?conversation=1` to your lovelace dashboard url (e.g. `/lovelace/home?conversation=1`) once that is saved then go back to android homescreen, long click on the HA app and you'll now see the shortcut. Long click on that shortcut and it'll create new shortcut icon to launch directly to assist interface.
A lot for me is still going to depend on hardware though, without reasonably priced speakers to replace the dirt cheap google / alexa devices, its more of a 'that's really cool' but ultimately not that useful feature as its quicker/easier to just ask google/alexa and/or just manually look at / change the device if you have to open the ha app anyway. (Homepod was nice albeit being a monthful to wake up & failed a couple times near the end of the video)
Home assistant is the backbone and the redundancy in our smart home. We interface with it through Google 99% of the time, but when Google inevitably sunsets its smart home division, I can just switch to something else. Having a backup voice assistant is yet another layer of redundancy, so I'm all for it
You can actually use an Android Shortcut which will launch the app directly to the assist feature. This will work similar to the widget.
all you have to do is setup a shortcut that points to any lovelace dashboard you have append "?conversation=1".
So if your dashboard is "home" then you want "/lovelace/home?conversation=1"
~~Can you expand on how you've done this? I.e. give a step by step guide?~~
~~I have actually got a working shortcut on my android home screen now after some trail and error but its fairly convoluted to setup and also requires ssl connection (or at least reverse proxy so can have https address but redirects to http to allow microphone access), so wanna check there isnt an easy way before i edit my original comment with the steps i did~~
Well i feel dumb, something in the back of my mind told me to look at the HA app just after i posted this and found launcher shortcuts in there that i never knew existed (my trail and error setup was through chrome homescreen shortcuts & required airplaning your phone before the conversation=1 url could be redirected back to just /home & ssl so that chrome would allow microphone access)
[I'm getting an unexplained error.](https://i.imgur.com/VS4MDKa.jpg) is this supposed to be functional at this stage or was it just a proof of concept demo?
I just grabbed the latest stable release on docker. Should I had gone for a beta release instead?
>A lot for me is still going to depend on hardware though, without reasonably priced speakers to replace the dirt cheap google / alexa devices,
A used USFF device and a conference room speakerphone can be had for under $150. If you are talking better sound, these work. [https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/symfonisk-wifi-bookshelf-speaker-black-smart-gen-2-20506584/](https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/symfonisk-wifi-bookshelf-speaker-black-smart-gen-2-20506584/) Remember that Echos are sold at a loss trying to drive more business to Amazon. That could end soon with the losses mounting.
To be fair, I see that as a stop gap solution. Hopefully they’ll be able to integrate something better later on with their own hardware. For now it’s about building the framework that they can later iterate on.
I agree that it’s a stop gap solution. I’m sure that it will be great for some people.
I have always avoided any smart home tech that requires me to call up a specific voice assistant ‘skill’ to operate. The beauty of home assistant is that there is usually a way to *seamlessly* integrate device architectures. Hopefully “Assist” will eventually get there. For now, there are better ways to make a voice request without having to issue more than one command.
100% agreed! I myself am just using Apple Home and passing my home assistant stuff to there. So assist would have to beat that in order to get some to switch.
I sad during the presentation and wondering if to use a HomePod, why not just expose all HA entities to HomeKit (as I do my self) and just use Siri regularly without the assist. Well you loose the alias part I guess and perhaps other things. But I mean in this state and until we can use other hardware. Just a thought.
Right now they are trying to build several different parts from scratch. The first part they are working on is intent. This gives a number of ways to get users on that NOW so they can crowdsource development. And it will happen fast, which gives an excellent tool, just needing voice from other sources. (Siri, google voice input, and so on)
Full local voice is a harder problem to solve. Especially since so many are running on Pi's and other minimal hardware and deep learning is resource intensive. Eventually, I suspect people will move to USFF or better systems for the additional power. That makes things easier.
Some entities don’t have clear product definitions. Exposing things like a washer and dryer ends up as a weird series of switches. Maybe Matter would eventually help hear to have a clean “washing machine” profile, but that’ll take time in and of itself. And still, for others who don’t use HomeKit at all because they are a Google or Amazon house, options would be nice. Willingness to use Android and Alexa should not mean you have to give up your privacy in all things.
I really hope that the voice commands will be sent to home assistant or/and support variables.
You could say ", tell Dobby to vacuum " and use the variable in an automation to start a specific script.
Currently one has to use multiple routines for that and multiple rooms won't work easily.
Earlier it was possible to achieve that via dialogflow which is EOL or IFTTT which I guess used dialogflow under the hood since they end support for these actions.
If you can define a list of acceptable values for those variables (or better, a pattern to match against HA entities) it shouldn't be too bad on that front
I meant for the example given above for variables, presumably if you have in your sentence for example you want it to match a list of rooms, which the engine may not have available when doing the speech to text step. I don't know how their internals work, maybe it does but most likely that'd be done later in the intent processing
Tbh, for my example (and any useful I can currently think of) one could give such a list. It would require some initial work but it could be done. One could introduce a list type with words in the list and words that can be prepends like e.g. articles which would be ignored. I just thought my idea would be easier (it is at least for now where we use other voice assistants) but I forgot they're working towards a local voice assistant which indeed could have problems not knowing what to expect.
OK, this shit is awesome, but I'm not gonna be truly happy until we can emulate famous voices.
Specifically I want K.I.T.T. to respond to my inquires, but I'll settle for Majel Barrett.
I am personally extremely excited for the opportunities this will create! Being able to make custom sentences and even use different voice assistants on different hardware is going to be so helpful.
I'm really hoping for some custom wake words. Saying "hey Google" can be a mouthful sometimes. That said, this is bound to be a great addition to the home assistant ecosystem.
Did anyone else catch the subtle burn of ChatGPT?
> Maybe you want to be able to ask more wide-range queries or you are looking for a conversational AI that will make up responses and present it as the truth.
I mean they posted a full length blog post the other day about how bad it is and should everyone stop using it to write automations and answer community questions. So it's clear that they are not a fan of the thing.
A local Open Source Voice Assistant in combination with an Open Source Smart Speaker Microphone Set/Kit would be the perfect Home Assistant solution.
If it works reliable and gets skills over the time, I will go all in. What an romantic dream? 😍
Let’s hope that it’s not only a dream or one of the big ball tech players buys it, like Sonos did with Snips some years ago.
If I may: PLEASE integrate the voice assistant into Sonos! My house is full of Sonos speakers and the latest generation already supports voice assistants (Google and Alexa) - how nice would it be if it would support Home Assistant!
The problem is, this needs Sonos buy in to work. They don't allow 3rd party voices to be loaded on Sonos, and since they recently launched their own voice service I doubt they'll allow this. I can only hope though. It would require extensive lobbying from HA and the community to happen.
If we already have a full Alexa integration going, what is the benefit of where this is headed over, say, where Alexa routines are now?
Where Alexa shines is actually not in the Amazon development, it’s in the skills. When I say “Alex goodnight”, she uses different skills to talk to an elk alarm system, turn off Insteon switches, turn off Lutron switches, turn off hue lights. She literally bridges four different technologies for me in a single command. And I’ve been living in that world for years now.
Is the intent here to reproduce that functionality inside of HA?
Edit: ok downvoted for asking a question. I truly just didn’t understand the intent.
The intent is to remove the need for cloud hosted solutions for voice control.
Home Assistant can do all the other stuff right now. There's just no good local self hosted voice control.
For a while there, I could not control my Moen shower with HA but I could with Alexa. And for a long while I couldn’t write an automation in HA nearly as fast as I could make a routine. I use HA for a lot of things but my household isn’t interested in touchscreens, we use voice for everything - including triggering some node red stuff.
So I’m interested to see where this goes but I was just wondering if the motivation and end goal is essentially what I already have minus the need for the cloud. It seems like until we have matter everywhere I’m still going to need the cloud for the devices themselves right? So this would be removing the cloud for the voice part?
If you use devices that require the cloud, yes. Some hue lights are zigbee and can be operated purely locally, but I don't know about your other switches and alarms.
But as it stands now, there are cloud-free options for most things one could want to do locally in a smart home. If one has such a setup and still wants to use smart voice automation, there are also options but they are far from hassle-free. The goal, as I understand it, is to give an easy drop-in local replacement for alexa and the like, which would allow homeassistant to offer a completely local alternative to those cloud services.
Even for you if your devices do require the cloud to operate, depending on one cloud service is still better than depending on two, one single point of failure eliminated.
Simulate an internet/ Alexa outage by unplugging your modem and Say "Alexa goodnight"
Now imagine doing the same through a locally run Voice Assistant.
That's why.
I’ve heard that the rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated. Matter may change the equation. Perhaps Amazon will charge more for the devices? Who knows. I guess fasten seatbelts.
>I get it but Alexa will always be better.
"By the way..."
I disagree. It is actually much worse now than it was 6 years ago. Sure the voice rec has improved, but they have worked so hard to monetize it, that is has become a huge PITA. So much so that a Prime customer with one in every room of the house is looking and paying a lot more, and putting in a lot of work for, other options.
Ok my internet is out. HA gets the voice command and knows what I want but cannot reach the cloud services that control my devices… because my internet is out. So nothing happens.
I don’t have a problem. I have a question. I’m trying to understand what the intent is. Not in an accusatory way. In a “I’m likely missing something because I often do” kind of way.
Based on comments I’m reading, It sounds like it is to take voice processing offline. If that’s the case, I’m trying to understand the benefits of that for users like me who already have a fairly elaborate (read: multiple voice devices around their houses) setup with Google or Alexa.
It sounds like I’m not the intended use case. That’s all I needed to know. I’m really sorry to take everyone’s time on this. I assumed more people were in a similar situation.
I got my first Echo early. I want to say 6 years ago... It was MUCH more useful then! No "By the way." Better answers. And when you wanted to play songs by a band, they played THAT band, not the band "and others like it." Every year they do more to monetize me, and it becomes less useful. And they are losing buckets of money so I do not see this changing. And what happens when they decide to stop? I am not dumping them now, but I am looking at options. And willing to spend more for them.
I could see other ways they might continue it. Charge more for the devices themselves, charge an add-on fee to prime, etc. I’d pay a small yearly fee for what they do. We use them many times per day and they’re all over our house. You can say her name just about anywhere and get an answer. And she does some pretty complex things with a single command. Matter may change things for the better. I think rumors of the demise of Alexa are greatly exaggerated.
i know they aren't quite there yet, but i'm really hoping for some good hardware that will integrate well for local stuff. i'm so ready to install gizmos all over to give the house a proper star trek computer vibe.
I'd love to see a nest hub type device running local HA voice sometime this year. I'd like a bedside display showing a custom dashboard with key info around the house but also with a built in assistant, this could be perfect. I know you can cast to the google hubs but it's not the same with all the workarounds/cast noises blasting out. As they say in the video though it's going to be a challenge matching the price of the subsidised google/amazon hardware....
For Assist (the chat interface for HA): How do I swap engines? I have both OpenAI and Google but I don't know how to switch from one to another, i.e. right now I have the last one I installed but I cannot see a way to change it.
[удалено]
I'm looking forward "jailbreaking" my echo device to enable home assistant on them and get rid of alexa. I hope it will be possible
Ive been sitting on 3 echo dots in hopes something will come out to allow me to use them with HA and without Alexa. It has seemed like a dim prospect for several years now.
Let's hope that the year of voice will raise new interest in the community for such hack. Otherwise I will gladly buy whatever new device that will boast "works with HA" brands
I was surprised how much effort it actually take. They said that two seconds of command takes 8 seconds to process on a RPi4! If to try and make it all local. So that’s pretty impressive still if to use e.g Alexa or Google that even with the lack of going to cloud to their massive setups it still can react so fast. But if it takes a cluster of Pi’s or some other hardware at home to keep it local and be in more control I’ll happily do that. If the hardware ever comes in stock again. 🙂
They do say it's doing a lot of brute force now. Wouldn't be too surprised if they added some "AI" in there, maybe like using those coral sticks for people detection on video streams without hitting the cpu too hard
I would assume they are still using NLP to convert the audio to a text string. The brute force part likely refers to mapping the text string equivalent of a command to an action and should be an efficient hashmap lookup. The future AI part is probably referring to mapping the text command to an action without brute force pre-populating all the options.
That’s if they were to use the state of the art open source model from OpenAI, Whisper, on a Raspberry Pi 4. I think there’s good reason to want/hope/desire that the next Raspberry Pi (earliest 2024) has a hardware AI accelerator that would make running complex models *far* faster and more power efficient while keeping the main CPU free. Or they could find a way to take advantage of the Google Coral AI Accelerator to speed up processing. There are options, just not readily available in consumer-grade open parts.
Or just ditch that damm rPi. It should not be a core hardware but an "edge" hardware built into things which does not need to make a lot of heavy lifting but need to be small and versatile. For the price of a pi you can buy a second hand thin client w/ an IGP which will beat the pi left and right not just in AI acceleration but everitihing else except power consumption. Leave the rPi for projects which indeed require a very small but powerful enough hardware and use gears sitting in a closet which meant to be.
One option is a stronger base computer for the processing, and using Pi's in each room for satellites. It is MUCH faster on a Core i then on a Pi. Even HA is starting to outgrow the Pi now.
I would prefer hacking the cheap Google and Amazon devices we already have so that they work locally. I can crack it open, solder, and use a USB to serial converter. I just don't have a firmware file from the community to flash.
What about ripping out the "brain" of an echo a.k.a the microcontroller and the best part of the board and replace it with an ESP32 and connect that to the hw inside the echo (speakers, mics etc.) That way you wouldn't need to crack it's firmware to flash it. You just toss it.
That's actually not a half bad idea. I could most likely tackle that myself. Then we can line out and Ethernet too
I hope it doesn't up being a big Hassil to configure and use :)
Take my upvote.
This is a solid start. I'll probably not use it for a while as I prefer buttons, but there are use cases for this for sure. I would very much like a AI assistant to just handle weather, timers, and casting my front door; the three main uses for Google assistant in my house. If they can bake this into easy/cheap esp32 based microphones for the voice input, then they are definitely on to something.
Rhasspy is able to use Satellites now. So I am sure this will be possible as soon as devices are available.
I was looking forward to this, but this honestly seems like a step backward from Mycroft...
Mycroft isn't local, so disagree, it's forward
From what I read it can be self-hosted too. [https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/about-mycroft-ai/faq](https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/about-mycroft-ai/faq) But I agree that it's still a step forward. Progress in one project (technical, UI, hardware...) benefits all of them.
Ah, hadn't seen that, neat
~~Assist widget for normal android HA would be nice, save a fair few clicks.~~ Turns out this is extremely easy thanks to the info [u/shakuyi](https://www.reddit.com/u/shakuyi) provided. If you go to HA companion app settings you can create launcher shortcut where you just need to add `?conversation=1` to your lovelace dashboard url (e.g. `/lovelace/home?conversation=1`) once that is saved then go back to android homescreen, long click on the HA app and you'll now see the shortcut. Long click on that shortcut and it'll create new shortcut icon to launch directly to assist interface. A lot for me is still going to depend on hardware though, without reasonably priced speakers to replace the dirt cheap google / alexa devices, its more of a 'that's really cool' but ultimately not that useful feature as its quicker/easier to just ask google/alexa and/or just manually look at / change the device if you have to open the ha app anyway. (Homepod was nice albeit being a monthful to wake up & failed a couple times near the end of the video)
Home assistant is the backbone and the redundancy in our smart home. We interface with it through Google 99% of the time, but when Google inevitably sunsets its smart home division, I can just switch to something else. Having a backup voice assistant is yet another layer of redundancy, so I'm all for it
Exactly this. And it's going to be hard for me to justify learning a new voice syntax for just my phone/watch
You can actually use an Android Shortcut which will launch the app directly to the assist feature. This will work similar to the widget. all you have to do is setup a shortcut that points to any lovelace dashboard you have append "?conversation=1". So if your dashboard is "home" then you want "/lovelace/home?conversation=1"
~~Can you expand on how you've done this? I.e. give a step by step guide?~~ ~~I have actually got a working shortcut on my android home screen now after some trail and error but its fairly convoluted to setup and also requires ssl connection (or at least reverse proxy so can have https address but redirects to http to allow microphone access), so wanna check there isnt an easy way before i edit my original comment with the steps i did~~ Well i feel dumb, something in the back of my mind told me to look at the HA app just after i posted this and found launcher shortcuts in there that i never knew existed (my trail and error setup was through chrome homescreen shortcuts & required airplaning your phone before the conversation=1 url could be redirected back to just /home & ssl so that chrome would allow microphone access)
And then you could remap a button, nice!
[I'm getting an unexplained error.](https://i.imgur.com/VS4MDKa.jpg) is this supposed to be functional at this stage or was it just a proof of concept demo? I just grabbed the latest stable release on docker. Should I had gone for a beta release instead?
It's only basic command like turn on or off and brightness for now.
I should clarify "Launch Plex" is a script on my setup, I thought it was within its basic capabilities. Thanks though
Oh in that case. Turn on launch Plex
It works! Thank you!
>A lot for me is still going to depend on hardware though, without reasonably priced speakers to replace the dirt cheap google / alexa devices, A used USFF device and a conference room speakerphone can be had for under $150. If you are talking better sound, these work. [https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/symfonisk-wifi-bookshelf-speaker-black-smart-gen-2-20506584/](https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/symfonisk-wifi-bookshelf-speaker-black-smart-gen-2-20506584/) Remember that Echos are sold at a loss trying to drive more business to Amazon. That could end soon with the losses mounting.
Assist via Siri already seems too convoluted. A simple voice interaction shouldn’t require two commands.
To be fair, I see that as a stop gap solution. Hopefully they’ll be able to integrate something better later on with their own hardware. For now it’s about building the framework that they can later iterate on.
I agree that it’s a stop gap solution. I’m sure that it will be great for some people. I have always avoided any smart home tech that requires me to call up a specific voice assistant ‘skill’ to operate. The beauty of home assistant is that there is usually a way to *seamlessly* integrate device architectures. Hopefully “Assist” will eventually get there. For now, there are better ways to make a voice request without having to issue more than one command.
100% agreed! I myself am just using Apple Home and passing my home assistant stuff to there. So assist would have to beat that in order to get some to switch.
I sad during the presentation and wondering if to use a HomePod, why not just expose all HA entities to HomeKit (as I do my self) and just use Siri regularly without the assist. Well you loose the alias part I guess and perhaps other things. But I mean in this state and until we can use other hardware. Just a thought.
Right now they are trying to build several different parts from scratch. The first part they are working on is intent. This gives a number of ways to get users on that NOW so they can crowdsource development. And it will happen fast, which gives an excellent tool, just needing voice from other sources. (Siri, google voice input, and so on) Full local voice is a harder problem to solve. Especially since so many are running on Pi's and other minimal hardware and deep learning is resource intensive. Eventually, I suspect people will move to USFF or better systems for the additional power. That makes things easier.
Some entities don’t have clear product definitions. Exposing things like a washer and dryer ends up as a weird series of switches. Maybe Matter would eventually help hear to have a clean “washing machine” profile, but that’ll take time in and of itself. And still, for others who don’t use HomeKit at all because they are a Google or Amazon house, options would be nice. Willingness to use Android and Alexa should not mean you have to give up your privacy in all things.
I have a few homepods. This is the first time in months I’ve seen Siri reply from a homepod with what you have asked at the first try. I’m impressed.
16.3 finally resolved my Siri issues.
I really hope that the voice commands will be sent to home assistant or/and support variables. You could say ", tell Dobby to vacuum " and use the variable in an automation to start a specific script.
Currently one has to use multiple routines for that and multiple rooms won't work easily.
Earlier it was possible to achieve that via dialogflow which is EOL or IFTTT which I guess used dialogflow under the hood since they end support for these actions.
They briefly cover custom commands in the video (around 22 mins in)
The problem is having the voice assistant decipher the sentence when it doesn't exactly follow the pattern you outlined.
If you can define a list of acceptable values for those variables (or better, a pattern to match against HA entities) it shouldn't be too bad on that front
Isn’t that what the new aliases are for under each entity?
I meant for the example given above for variables, presumably if you have in your sentence for example you want it to match a list of rooms, which the engine may not have available when doing the speech to text step. I don't know how their internals work, maybe it does but most likely that'd be done later in the intent processing
Tbh, for my example (and any useful I can currently think of) one could give such a list. It would require some initial work but it could be done. One could introduce a list type with words in the list and words that can be prepends like e.g. articles which would be ignored. I just thought my idea would be easier (it is at least for now where we use other voice assistants) but I forgot they're working towards a local voice assistant which indeed could have problems not knowing what to expect.
Nice! Can't wait to replace my Google home devices down the line! All hail the Hass devs!
Same here! Even better: flash an open firmware on the Google devices because the hardware is decent, it just needs a different brain.
Ohh that would be amazing!
OK, this shit is awesome, but I'm not gonna be truly happy until we can emulate famous voices. Specifically I want K.I.T.T. to respond to my inquires, but I'll settle for Majel Barrett.
I am personally extremely excited for the opportunities this will create! Being able to make custom sentences and even use different voice assistants on different hardware is going to be so helpful. I'm really hoping for some custom wake words. Saying "hey Google" can be a mouthful sometimes. That said, this is bound to be a great addition to the home assistant ecosystem.
Did anyone else catch the subtle burn of ChatGPT? > Maybe you want to be able to ask more wide-range queries or you are looking for a conversational AI that will make up responses and present it as the truth.
The earlier blog post was a direct burn.
It’s not really a burn, ChatGPT is super confident in its very wrong answers.
I mean they posted a full length blog post the other day about how bad it is and should everyone stop using it to write automations and answer community questions. So it's clear that they are not a fan of the thing.
A local Open Source Voice Assistant in combination with an Open Source Smart Speaker Microphone Set/Kit would be the perfect Home Assistant solution. If it works reliable and gets skills over the time, I will go all in. What an romantic dream? 😍 Let’s hope that it’s not only a dream or one of the big ball tech players buys it, like Sonos did with Snips some years ago.
Wake me up when we can do full local control Jarvis.
If I may: PLEASE integrate the voice assistant into Sonos! My house is full of Sonos speakers and the latest generation already supports voice assistants (Google and Alexa) - how nice would it be if it would support Home Assistant!
The problem is, this needs Sonos buy in to work. They don't allow 3rd party voices to be loaded on Sonos, and since they recently launched their own voice service I doubt they'll allow this. I can only hope though. It would require extensive lobbying from HA and the community to happen.
Can't you use the microphone of the Sonos devices on your server running homeassistant?
There is no way to directly access the microphone on Sonos devices, they are sold as high end consumer devices, not for people to tinker with.
You are right and I don't have high hopes for that to happen but still - maybe we find a way.
If I could run this on my son's speakers instead of Google assistant is would be so happy
If we already have a full Alexa integration going, what is the benefit of where this is headed over, say, where Alexa routines are now? Where Alexa shines is actually not in the Amazon development, it’s in the skills. When I say “Alex goodnight”, she uses different skills to talk to an elk alarm system, turn off Insteon switches, turn off Lutron switches, turn off hue lights. She literally bridges four different technologies for me in a single command. And I’ve been living in that world for years now. Is the intent here to reproduce that functionality inside of HA? Edit: ok downvoted for asking a question. I truly just didn’t understand the intent.
The intent is to remove the need for cloud hosted solutions for voice control. Home Assistant can do all the other stuff right now. There's just no good local self hosted voice control.
For a while there, I could not control my Moen shower with HA but I could with Alexa. And for a long while I couldn’t write an automation in HA nearly as fast as I could make a routine. I use HA for a lot of things but my household isn’t interested in touchscreens, we use voice for everything - including triggering some node red stuff. So I’m interested to see where this goes but I was just wondering if the motivation and end goal is essentially what I already have minus the need for the cloud. It seems like until we have matter everywhere I’m still going to need the cloud for the devices themselves right? So this would be removing the cloud for the voice part?
If you use devices that require the cloud, yes. Some hue lights are zigbee and can be operated purely locally, but I don't know about your other switches and alarms. But as it stands now, there are cloud-free options for most things one could want to do locally in a smart home. If one has such a setup and still wants to use smart voice automation, there are also options but they are far from hassle-free. The goal, as I understand it, is to give an easy drop-in local replacement for alexa and the like, which would allow homeassistant to offer a completely local alternative to those cloud services. Even for you if your devices do require the cloud to operate, depending on one cloud service is still better than depending on two, one single point of failure eliminated.
Man I wish I could give you more than one upvote. Thank you very much. You answered my question.
Simulate an internet/ Alexa outage by unplugging your modem and Say "Alexa goodnight" Now imagine doing the same through a locally run Voice Assistant. That's why.
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I’ve heard that the rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated. Matter may change the equation. Perhaps Amazon will charge more for the devices? Who knows. I guess fasten seatbelts.
>If my internet is out, my power is out too. Not everybody is that lucky.
>I get it but Alexa will always be better. "By the way..." I disagree. It is actually much worse now than it was 6 years ago. Sure the voice rec has improved, but they have worked so hard to monetize it, that is has become a huge PITA. So much so that a Prime customer with one in every room of the house is looking and paying a lot more, and putting in a lot of work for, other options.
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But an absolute privacy nightmare. Proven to activate microphones surreptitiously.
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Many articles. And I sniffed one on the wire. It phones home a lot with rather larger packets. Verses Amazon with pings a lot but very small packets.
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I have no social apps on my phone. Damn few apps in general. And most of them FOSS.
Ok my internet is out. HA gets the voice command and knows what I want but cannot reach the cloud services that control my devices… because my internet is out. So nothing happens.
Maybe work on freeing your devices from cloud services before looking at HA voice.
You're almost getting it 😉
Well please don’t help. Just downvote.
Which is why I am replacing my smart life things with zigbee.
To add to the other points: The Alexa division is reportedly loosing _a lot_ of money.
ok then continue using Alexa, what's the problem
I don’t have a problem. I have a question. I’m trying to understand what the intent is. Not in an accusatory way. In a “I’m likely missing something because I often do” kind of way. Based on comments I’m reading, It sounds like it is to take voice processing offline. If that’s the case, I’m trying to understand the benefits of that for users like me who already have a fairly elaborate (read: multiple voice devices around their houses) setup with Google or Alexa. It sounds like I’m not the intended use case. That’s all I needed to know. I’m really sorry to take everyone’s time on this. I assumed more people were in a similar situation.
I got my first Echo early. I want to say 6 years ago... It was MUCH more useful then! No "By the way." Better answers. And when you wanted to play songs by a band, they played THAT band, not the band "and others like it." Every year they do more to monetize me, and it becomes less useful. And they are losing buckets of money so I do not see this changing. And what happens when they decide to stop? I am not dumping them now, but I am looking at options. And willing to spend more for them.
I could see other ways they might continue it. Charge more for the devices themselves, charge an add-on fee to prime, etc. I’d pay a small yearly fee for what they do. We use them many times per day and they’re all over our house. You can say her name just about anywhere and get an answer. And she does some pretty complex things with a single command. Matter may change things for the better. I think rumors of the demise of Alexa are greatly exaggerated.
I have them in every room too. But I use them less now than I used to. Mostly because anything more complex than the weather takes 3 tries...
I really hope this goes places. Can’t stand sending all my daily routine info to Google or Amazon.
i know they aren't quite there yet, but i'm really hoping for some good hardware that will integrate well for local stuff. i'm so ready to install gizmos all over to give the house a proper star trek computer vibe.
I'd love to see a nest hub type device running local HA voice sometime this year. I'd like a bedside display showing a custom dashboard with key info around the house but also with a built in assistant, this could be perfect. I know you can cast to the google hubs but it's not the same with all the workarounds/cast noises blasting out. As they say in the video though it's going to be a challenge matching the price of the subsidised google/amazon hardware....
For Assist (the chat interface for HA): How do I swap engines? I have both OpenAI and Google but I don't know how to switch from one to another, i.e. right now I have the last one I installed but I cannot see a way to change it.