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The era of open voice assistants

home-assistant.io

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Re: The era of open voice assistants

#91

Post by imiric »

freedomben wrote: post #80
lelag wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, I think, a common feeling among Echo/Alexa users. Now that people are getting used to the amazing understanding capabilities of ChatGPT and the likes, it probably increases the frustration level because you get a hint of how good it could be. I believe it boils down to two main issues: - The narrow AI systems used for intent inference have not scaled with the product features. - Amazon is stuck and can't signi…

It seems ridiculous to me that this comment is so down voted. It's a thoughtful and interesting comment, and contains a reasonable and even likely explanation for what we've seen, once one puts aside the bottom that Amazon is just evil, which isn't a useful way to think of you truly want to understand the world and motivations. I'm guessing people reflexively down vote because they hate Amazon and it could read like…

I didn't downvote it, but claiming that Echo/Alexa are behind because of financial reasons is misguided at best.

Amazon is one of the richest companies on the planet, with vast datacenters that power large parts of the internet. If they wanted to improve their AI products they certainly have the resources to do so.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#92

Post by choffee »

tomqueue wrote: post #48

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 s…

It's all open and so should be able to work with OpenHAB as well but it would need somebody to either write a firmware that's compatibale with the OpenHAB endpoints or add ESPHome interegeation into OpenHAB. Somebody might have already done that for their voice stuff. There is not much yaml in home assistant now unless you want it. I'd give it a go in a VM and see what it finds on your network :)

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#93

Post by choffee »

ahaucnx wrote: post #63

It'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.

I would think so in the end. They talked about the case design being open. The software and firmware are all open already and they said that they really wanted people to be able to take these components and make new devices.

They have relesased the designs for the yellow so I assume it will all come. https://github.com/NabuCasa/yellow

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#95

Post by robotfelix »

fons wrote: post #82

I wonder how this compares to the Respeaker 2 https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/ReSpeaker_Mic_Array_v2.0/ The respeaker has 4 mics and can easily cancel out the noise introduced by a custom external speaker

It's worth noting that product is listed in the "Discontinued Products" section of the linked wiki.

Both of the ReSpeaker products in the non-discontinued section (ReSpeaker Lite, ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT) have only 2 mics, so it appears that things are converging in that direction.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#96

Post by robotfelix »

singularity2001 wrote: post #77

sorry if this question takes away from the great strives the team went through but wouldn't it be much easier (hardware wise) to jailbreak one of the existing great hardware thingies like Apple HomePod or the Google one or Alexa?

I've picked up an Echo Dot a few years ago when Amazon were practically giving them away, thinking that surely someone would have jailbroken it by now to allow it to be used with Home Assistant.

It was only after researching later that I discovered that this wasn't currently possible and recommended approach was to buy some replacement internals that cost more than the device itself (and if I recall correctly, more than the new Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition).

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#97

Post by Lanolderen »

lxe wrote: 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…

I'd imagine with 1-2 TVs constantly talking, general conversations and other random noises it'd get expensive quick. Definitely closer to a rack than a RaspPi or old laptop hardware wise. Also add to that more/better mics for coverage and the complexity of it guessing when you're asking it to remind you to buy toothpaste or your SO... It can probably be done by tracking who's home, who's in the room with the speaker, who the speaker is, etc but it's all cost..

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#98

Post by stavros »

lelag wrote: post #78
oaththrowaway wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the Alexa devices I own have gotten worse. Can't do simple things (setting a timer used to be instant, now it takes 10-15 seconds of thinking assuming it heard properly), playing music is a joke (will try to play through Deezer even though I disaled that integration months ago, and then will default to Amazon Music instead of Spotify which is set as the default). And then even simple skills can't understand wh…

It is, I think, a common feeling among Echo/Alexa users. Now that people are getting used to the amazing understanding capabilities of ChatGPT and the likes, it probably increases the frustration level because you get a hint of how good it could be. I believe it boils down to two main issues: - The narrow AI systems used for intent inference have not scaled with the product features. - Amazon is stuck and can't signi…

I think the economics here are wrong by orders of magnitude. It doesn't make sense to deploy to the home an expensive GPU that will sit idle 99% of the time, unless running an LLM gets much cheaper, computationally. It's much cheaper to run it on-premise and charge a subscription, otherwise nobody would pay for ChatGPT and would have an LLM rig at home instead.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#100

Post by choffee »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #8

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…

They showed a video at the end of their broadcast last night comparing what the raw microphone hears and what comes out of the XMOS chip and you can hear a much clearer voice all the time even when there is noise or you are far away from the device. It is also used to cancel out the music if you are using it's speaker output. I don't think it's doing any voice processing but it's cleaning up the audio a lot which makes the job of the wake word processor and the speach to text a lot easier. Up until now this was missing from a lot of the home made voice assistance and I think why Alexa can understand you from the next room but my home made one struggles with all but quiet conditions.
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