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The era of open voice assistants

home-assistant.io

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Re: The era of open voice assistants

#41

Post by joshstrange »

shaklee3 wrote: post #39

As someone not that familiar with haas, can someone explain why there's not a clear path to replace Alexa or Google home? I considered using haas recently to get a gpt like response after being frustrated with Google home, but it seems this is a complete mess. is there a way to get this yet?

> explain why there's not a clear path to replace Alexa or Google home?

There is. I've used HA with their default assist pipeline (Cloud HA STT, Cloud HA LLM, Cloud HA TTS) and I've also plugged in different providers at each step (both remote and local for each part: STT/LLM/TTS) and it's super cool. Their default LLM isn't great but it works, plugging in OpenAI made it work way better. My local models weren't great in speed but I don't have hardware dedicated for this purpose (currently), seeing an entire local pipeline was amazing for the promise of it in the future. It's too slow (on my hardware) but we are so close to local models (SST/TTS could be improved as well but they are much easier to do already locally).

If this new HA hardware comes even close to performing as well as the Echo's in my house (low bar) I'll replace them all.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#42

Post by joshstrange »

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.

You can use your phone to text or talk to HA's assistant. I've done that a number of times when Alexa fails. Having dedicated hardware is a huge step up for me. I've tried their ESP32 mini cube assistant thing before and it showed a lot of promise but the hardware (speaker and mic, processor was fine) was lacking. This seems to be a good mic and speaker wrapped around a similar core so I'm super excited for it.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#43

Post by joshstrange »

nickthegreek wrote: post #9

And on back order everywhere. I just spent the last 2 weeks getting a esp32-s3-box setup to do this but its lack of audio out really irks me.

And the mic is not all that great either. I have a couple of them but they just weren't reliably picking up my voice and I couldn't hear the reply either (when it did hear me). I figured it would be easy to add a speaker to them but that sent me down a rabbit hole that I gave up on and put them in a drawer. I'll buy this for sure though because when the ESP32 box thing worked it worked really well and I loved being able to swap out parts of the assist pipeline.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#44

Post by lokar »

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…

It’s a great project overall, but I’ve been frustrated by how anti-engineer it has been trending.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#45

Post by ilaksh »

antonyt wrote: post #20
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…

Does it use Node-RED for the pipeline?

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#47

Post by [deleted] »

Brendinooo wrote: post #30
Jarwain wrote: 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.

[deleted]

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#48

Post by tomqueue »

I am very excited for this. One question I couldn’t find an answer for though is whether the hardware is open enough to be usable with other home automation systems. I am using OpenHAB and they too have an integrated voice assistant. I looked into migrating to HA a couple times but eventually gave up, primarily because it felt like such a waste of time to migrate a fully working environment with dozens of rules and scripts to yaml files.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#49

Post by haddonist »

ilaksh wrote: post #45
antonyt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does it use Node-RED for the pipeline?

No, all of the voice parts are either inbuilt or direct addons.
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