The era of open voice assistants

[dead]

I don't fully understand the cloud upsell. I have a beefy GPU. I would like to run the "more advanced" models locally.

By "I don't fully understand," I mean just that. There's a lot of marketing copy, but there's a lot I'd like to understand better before plopping down $$$ for a unit. The answers might be reasonable.

Ideally, I'd be able to experiment with a headset first, and if it works well, upgrade to the $59 unit.

I'd love to just have a README, with a getting started tutorial, play, and then upgrade if it does what I want.

Again: None of this is a complaint. I assume much of this is coming once we're past preview addition, or is perhaps there and my search skills are failing me.

We need more projects like home assistant. I started using it recently and was amazed. They sell their own hardware but the whole setup is designed to works on any other hardware. There are detailed docs for installation on your own hardware. And, it works amazingly well.

Same for their voice assistant. You can but their hardware and get started right away or you can place your own mics and speakers around home and it will still work. You can but your own beefy hardware and run your own LLM.

The possibilities with home assistant are endless. Thanks to this community for breaking the barriers created by big tech

Not super convinced the XMOS audio processing chip is really gonna buy a lot. Trying to do audio input processing feels like a dynamic task, requiring such adaption. XMOS is the most well known audio processor and a beast, but not sure it's really gonna help here!

I really hope we see some open-source machine -learned systems emerge.

I saw Insta360 announce their video conferencing solution today. Optics looks pretty medium, nothing wild, but Insta360 is so good at video that I expect it'll be great. But there's a huge 14 microphone array on it, and that's the hard job; figuring out how to get good audio from speakers in a variety of locations around a room. It really made me wish for more open source footing here, some promising start, be it the conference room or open living space. I've given all of 60s to look through this, and was kinda hopeful because heck yeah Home Assistant, but my initial read isn't super promising, isn't that this is starting the proper software base needed to listen well to the world.

https://petapixel.com/2024/12/17/the-insta360-connect-is-a-2...

Though a separate hardware helps - I believe voice and automation can be integrated more seamlessly to our existing devices (phones/laptops) with high compute built in.

Llama and whisper are already public so that should help innovation in this area.