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How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

arstechnica.com

11–20 of 140 posts

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#11
2023 is "The Year of the Voice" for Home Assistant, so you'll at least be able to directly add prompts and sentences that it'll understand and respond to, instead of relying on Google's/Amazon's/Apple's dumb "AI".

Hopefully the OSS speech to text will be good, since then it'll work as good as you program it to. Not relying on "the cloud" for voice assistance would be awesome.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#12
Can also get a long way just with Tasmota smart plugs. Set up timers, can still press a button on the side of it to turn on and off. Mqtt for phone control override and can go the full home assistant if you want to go that way. Also very helpful provide detailed power consumption stats.

Athom do both tasmota and esphome pre-installed. Haven't tried esphome plus. I get their stuff from Ali and it has been ok so far. Anyone had good experiences with something else and I'm all ears.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#13
I currently have a SmartThings Hub and Homeassistant Yellow, but if I were starting over today, I'd be all in on Matter (mostly thread) and avoid ZWave and Zigbee outright. I'm mostly stuck to zwave because of my blinds, but I think I will slowly replace all my smart home related things with Matter.

There's still a few sensors that there don't have a Matter equivalent yet, but I think that'll change soon.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#14
post #6

I've been wanting a "house tablet" for a while - something to interact with my (app only) heating controls and play music on spotify. Has anyone found an acceptable setup? I had an old Android tablet permanently wall mounted for a while, but it was too slow (single core). I'd love an "appliance" style android tablet - but these don't seem to exist.

Both Android and iOS devices can be put into so-called Kiosk mode when they run a single app without other chrome. Is that not acceptable? The cheapest fire tablet is fine for the use-case.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#15
I've got an old iPad Air 2 lying around and a full Home Assistant setup, but I haven't bothered doing anything with it - frankly, I don't get it.

Unless your place is quite small, a wall mounted tablet just seems like a hassle. Even disregarding all the hassle with the mounting and interface config, what are the advantages? Having to walk to a single position to control my smart home doesn't seem very smart, honestly? Can anyone educate me?

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#16
post #2

home assistant, dozens of cheap nfc stickers, and ios shortcuts that trigger home assistant actions when you boop the appropriate sticker with your locked phone.

That's a really weird suggestion. Get some buttons. Ikea Tradfri buttons work. Aquara makes some as well but I have no experience with them.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#17
post #6

I've been wanting a "house tablet" for a while - something to interact with my (app only) heating controls and play music on spotify. Has anyone found an acceptable setup? I had an old Android tablet permanently wall mounted for a while, but it was too slow (single core). I'd love an "appliance" style android tablet - but these don't seem to exist.

Owntone does Spotify premium accounts and serves up a web page you can use to control it. Itunes remote app as provided by Apple or "Retune" app on droid also work to control. Any additional airplay speakers (or shairport-sync) can control to have the sound coming out of them aka multiroom. Owntone integrates nicely with home assistant if you want to go there too.

If you can run a light webpage with the tablet it should be enough. Owntone and homeassistant need to run somewhere else on your network like on a pi, or an old laptop.

Your app only heating controls may well also integrate with homeassistant, a hell of a lot of that kind of stuff does. Homeassistant also serves up a light web page as a control interface. There's phone & tablet apps too.

Worth a look, imho.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#18
post #9
post #6

I've been wanting a "house tablet" for a while - something to interact with my (app only) heating controls and play music on spotify. Has anyone found an acceptable setup? I had an old Android tablet permanently wall mounted for a while, but it was too slow (single core). I'd love an "appliance" style android tablet - but these don't seem to exist.

I'd love something like that but with some low power screen (e-paper? One of those super low power memory LCDs) and running 2 weeks off charge. Just so it can be constantly on and display status while not requiring tethering.

Connecting a screen to a raspberry pi could be an idea

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#20
post #14
post #6

I've been wanting a "house tablet" for a while - something to interact with my (app only) heating controls and play music on spotify. Has anyone found an acceptable setup? I had an old Android tablet permanently wall mounted for a while, but it was too slow (single core). I'd love an "appliance" style android tablet - but these don't seem to exist.

Both Android and iOS devices can be put into so-called Kiosk mode when they run a single app without other chrome. Is that not acceptable? The cheapest fire tablet is fine for the use-case.

It's not a software problem - it's a hardware problem. A tablet is designed to be a portable, handheld device - I want a wall mounted (or maybe tabletop), permanently powered device. I have no need for a battery.

There does appear to be a few Lenovo tablets which come with a permanent dock - maybe that's the solution?

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