A good emphasis in the summary, that certain other companies will only focus on monetization at the expense of features and functionality.
The era of open voice assistants
61–70 of 290 posts
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#62Perfect will dig more into it. Currently i like to have an spotify client without ui for my kids ;)
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#63It's not clear to me from the description if this is also completely open source hardware. Are the schematics, BoM, firmware published under a permissible license? If so, where are they accessible?
And if not, I would be curious to know why it haven't been fully open sourced.
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#64We 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.
Do you mean the move away from YAML first configs?
I was originally somewhat frustrated, but overall, it's much better (let's be honest, YAML sucks) and more user friendly (by that I mean having a form with pre-filled fields is easier than having to copy paste YAML).
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#65And 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.
If it's an ESP32-S3-BOX-3, there is audio out (assuming you mean being able to send arbitrary audio to it to play). Due to the framework used it's not available, but there's an alternative firmware available on GitHub that uses the newer framework and it exposes a media player entity you can send any audio to.
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The problem is that it will go off every single time you watch Star Trek.
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#67I'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.
I guess the difference here is that HA has a huge community already. I believe the estimate was around 250k installations running actively. I suspect a huge chunk of the HA users venn diagram slice fits within the voice users slice.
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#68It's too bad it's sold out everywhere. I've tried the ESP32 projects (little cube guy) for voice assistants in HA but it's mic/speaker weren't good enough. When it did hear me (and I heard it) it did an amazing job. For the first time I talked to a voice assistant that understood "Turn off office lights" to mean "Turn off all the lights in the office" without me giving it any special grouping (like I have to do in Al…
How did you find it for music tasks?
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#69That's a pretty timely release considering Alexa and the Google assistant devices seem to have plateaued or are on the decline.
Curious what you mean by that.
GH is basically abandonware at this stage it seems. They just seem to break random things, and there haven’t been any major updates / features for ages (and Gemini is still a way off for most).
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#70I 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…
Finding microphones that look nice, can pick up voice at high enough quality to extract commands and that cover an entire room is surprisingly hard. If this device delivers on audio quality it's totally worth it at $59.
100%. For a lot of users that have WAF and time available to contend with, this is a steal.
Bear in mind that a $50 google home or Alexa mini(?) is always going to be whatever google deem it to be. This is an open device which can be whatever you want it to be. That’s a lot of value in my eyes.