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The era of open voice assistants

home-assistant.io

21–30 of 290 posts

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#21
post #19

All I want is a voice assistant that I can call "computer" like Star Trek, I don't want to have to say a brand name thankyou!

You could’ve always set Alexa to respond to “Computer” instead.

Ah I admit I haven't looked into it for several years, good to see they added the feature - I might have to grab one

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#22
Here's what I'm looking for in a voice assistant:

- Full privacy: nothing goes to the "cloud"

- Non-shitty microphones and processing: i want to be able to be heard without having to yell, repeat, or correct

- No wake words: it should listen to everything, process it, and understand when it's being addressed. Since everything is private and local, this is now doable

- Conversational: it should understand when I finished talking, have ability to be interrupted, all with low latency

- Non-stupid: it's 2024, and alexa and siri and google are somehow absolutely abysmal at doing even the basics

- Complete: i don't want to use an app to get stuff configured. I want everything to be controlled via voice

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#23
Can someone describe the use case here? I don't quite understand what its purpose is.

Is this a fully-private, open source alternative to Alexa, that by definition requires a CPU locally to run ?

Is the device supposed to be the nerve center of IoT devices ?

Can it access the Wifi to do web crawls on command (music, google, etc)?

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#25
While we are getting shoveled AI keyword everywhere, I'm actually disappointed I don't see it here.

The first thought I had when encountering LLM was that it can finally make these devices understand you and make them finally useful... and I don't need to know some presceipted keywords.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#26
post #25

While we are getting shoveled AI keyword everywhere, I'm actually disappointed I don't see it here. The first thought I had when encountering LLM was that it can finally make these devices understand you and make them finally useful... and I don't need to know some presceipted keywords.

You can actually integrate LLMs with Assist pipelines, it’s just orthogonal to this hardware announcement. Check out https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/06/05/release-20246/...

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#27
post #22

Here's what I'm looking for in a voice assistant: - Full privacy: nothing goes to the "cloud" - Non-shitty microphones and processing: i want to be able to be heard without having to yell, repeat, or correct - No wake words: it should listen to everything, process it, and understand when it's being addressed. Since everything is private and local, this is now doable - Conversational: it should understand when I finis…

> No wake words: it should listen to everything, process it, and understand when it's being addressed

Even humans struggle with this one - that's what names are for!

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#28

Can someone describe the use case here? I don't quite understand what its purpose is. Is this a fully-private, open source alternative to Alexa, that by definition requires a CPU locally to run ? Is the device supposed to be the nerve center of IoT devices ? Can it access the Wifi to do web crawls on command (music, google, etc)?

If you have home automation, surely you've run into this situation when Comcast flakes (or similar):

"OK, Google, turn lights on" "Check your connection and try again"

As far as I can tell, if you have Home Assistant + this new device, you've fixed that problem.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#29

All I want is a voice assistant that I can call "computer" like Star Trek, I don't want to have to say a brand name thankyou!

If you run openWakeWord, “computer” is one of very many pretrained models the community has made: https://github.com/fwartner/home-assistant-wakewords-collect...

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#30
post #7

I'm actually really excited for this! I noticed recently there weren't any good open source hardware projects for voice assistants with a focus on privacy. There's another project I've been thinking about where I think the privacy aspect is Important, and figuring out a good hardware stack has been a Process. The project I want to work on isn't exactly a voice assistant, but same ultimate hardware requirements Someth…

I invested in Mycroft and it flopped. Here’s hoping some others can go where they couldn’t.
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