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The era of open voice assistants

home-assistant.io

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Re: The era of open voice assistants

#101

Post by PhilippGille »

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…

> We need more projects like home assistant

Isn't openHAB an existing popular alternative?

https://www.openhab.org/

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#102

Post by balloob »

bdavbdav wrote: post #67
Brendinooo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Our estimates are more than a million active instances https://analytics.home-assistant.io/

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#103

Post by thanksgiving »

imiric wrote: post #91
freedomben wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you justify to your manager to spend (and more importantly commit to spending for a long time) hundreds of millions of dollars in aws resources every year? Sure, you already have the hardware but that's a different org, right? You can't expect them to give you those resources for free. Also, voice needs to be instant. You can't say 'Well, the AWS instances are currently expensive. Try again when my spot prices are lower."

I am sure you know this but maybe some don't know that basically only the hot word detection is on device. It needs to be connected to the Internet for basically everything else. It already costs Amazon.com some money to run this infrastructure. What we are asking will cost more and you can't really charge the users more. I personally would definitely not sign up for a paid subscription to use Amazon Alexa.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#104

Post by bronco21016 »

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.

I think Mycroft was unfortunately just ahead of its time. STT was just becoming good enough but NLU wasn’t quite there yet. Add in you’re up against Apple Google and Amazon who were able to add integrations like music and subsidize the crap out of their products.

I just think this time around is different. Open Whisper gives them amazing STT and LLMs can far more easily be adapted for the NLU portion. The hardware is also dirt cheap which makes it better suited to a narrow use case.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#105

Post by sanjitkalita »

esperent wrote: post #73
IgorPartola wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A group buy for an existing product makes sense. Want to buy a 24TB Western Digital hard drive? It’s $350. But if you and your 1000 closest friends get together the price can be $275. But for a first time unknown product? You get a lot fewer interested parties. Lots of people want to wait for tech reviews and blog posts before committing to it. And group buys being the only way to get them means availability will be…

> But for a first time unknown product? You get a lot fewer interested parties. Lots of people want to wait for tech reviews and blog posts before committing to it. I used to think so too. But then Kickstarter proved that actually, as long as you have a good advertising style, communicate well, and get lucky, you can get people to contribute literal millions for a product that hasn't even reached the blueprints stage…

[flagged]

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#106

Post by baq »

imiric wrote: post #91
freedomben wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alexa is probably a cool billion under or something. They never figured out how to make money with it.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#108

Post by pimeys »

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'm also very excited. I've had some ESP32 microphones before, but they were not really able to understand the wake word, sometimes even when it was quiet and you were sitting next to the mic.

This one looks like it can recognize your voice very well, even when music is playing.

Because... when it works, it's amazing. You get that Star Trek wake word (KHUM-PUTER!), you can connect your favorite LLM to it (ChatGPT, Claude Sonnet, Ollama), you can control your home automation with it and it's as private as you want.

I ordered two of these, if they are great, I will order two more. I've been waiting for this product for years, it's hopefully finally here.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#110

Post by btreecat »

PhilippGille wrote: post #101
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…

> We need more projects like home assistant Isn't openHAB an existing popular alternative? https://www.openhab.org/

HA long ago blew past OpenHAB in functionality and community.

Unless you have a hard-on for JVM services, HA is the better XP these days.

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