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The era of open voice assistants

home-assistant.io

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Re: The era of open voice assistants

#11

Post by nickthegreek »

frognumber wrote: post #4

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 uni…

The cloud sale is easy if you are an HA user already. If you don’t use Home Assistant right now, you probably rec it the target audience. I purchase the yearly cloud service as it’s an easy way to support HA development. It also gives you remote access to your system without having to do any setup. It provides an https connection which allows you to program esp32 devices through Chrome. And now they added the ability to do TTS and STT on someone else’s hardware. HA even allows you to setup a local llm for house control commands but route other queries directly to the cloud.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#12

Post by mkagenius »

thumbsup-_- wrote: post #6

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 i…

I am working on automation of phones (open source) - https://github.com/BandarLabs/clickclickclick

I haven't been able to quite get the Llama vision models working but I suppose with new releases in future, it should work as good as Gemini in finding bounding boxes of UI elements.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#14

Post by Jarwain »

frognumber wrote: post #4

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 uni…

I can't speak to home assistant specifically, but the last time I looked at voice models, supporting multiple languages and doing it Really Well just happens to require a model with a massive amount of RAM, especially to run at anything resembling real-time.

It's be awesome if they open sourced that model though, or published what models they're using. But I think it unlikely to happen because home assistant is a sorta funnel to nabu casa

That said, from what I can find, it sounds like Assist can be run without the hardware, either with or without the cloud upgrade. So you could definitely use your own hardware, headset, speakers, etc. to play with Assist

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#16

Post by antonyt »

mkagenius wrote: post #10

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.

With existing phones and laptops, there’s either activation friction (pressing the “listen to me” button) or the device has to be always listening, which requires a lot of trust in your hardware vendors.

With an open source and potentially local-only device, you can have your voice assistant and keep your privacy.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#20

Post by antonyt »

frognumber wrote: post #4

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 uni…

You can do exactly that - set up an Assist pipeline that glues together services running wherever you want, including a GPU node for faster-whisper. The HA interface even has a screen where you can test your pipeline with your computer’s microphone.

It’s not exactly batteries-included, and doesn’t exercise the on-device wake word detection that satellite hardware would provide, but it’s doable.

But I don’t know that the unit will be an “upgrade” over most headsets. These devices are designed to be cheap, low-power, and have to function in tougher scenarios than speaking directly into a boom mic.

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