Is anyone aware of an effort to repurpose Echo hardware to do HA voice?
The era of open voice assistants
201–210 of 290 posts
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Oh thank got. Just started using HA few months ago and all these yaml is so confusing when I try to code it with ChatGPT , constant syntax or some other random errors.
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#203It isn't even one year since the press stories about how dumb a product Alexa was and how it makes no money and all the devs are getting laid off. Something changed now?
Amazon lost 25 billion dollars on Alexa (between 2017 and 2021, from WSJ https://archive.is/uMTOB ). Selling the hardware at a loss and I imagine a bigger portion was the thousands of people they had working in that division. So yeah, Alexa is a dumb product... for Amazon. No one uses Alexa to buy anything from Amazon because the only way you can be sure of what you're ordering from Amazon is to be looking at the sit…
> “We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” said a former senior employee.
How the hell did Amazon hire that many people to develop such low-tech devices.
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#204Looks great! The biggest issue I see is music. 90% of my use is "play some music" but none of the major streaming music providers offer APIs for obvious reasons. I'm not sure how you can get around that really.
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, Cl…
As a side note, it always slightly puzzles me when I see "voice interface" and "private" used together. Maybe it takes living alone to issue voice commands and feel some privacy. (Yes, I do understand that "privacy" here is mostly about not sending it for processing to third parties.)
I don't like these interaces because unless they are button activated or something, they must be always listening and sending sound from where you are to a 3rd party server. No thanks. Of course this could be happening with my phone, but at least it have to be a malicious action to record me 24/7
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#206Not 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 mak…
Alexa Echo Dot has 6 or 7 microphones. I'd expect that makes it much easier to filter out voices directionally than only the 2 microphone this hardware has. I hope they release a version with more microphones.
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#207If it's possible for the hardware to facilitate a use case, the employees working on the product will try to push the limits as far as they possibly can in order to manufacture interesting and challenging problems that will get them higher performance ratings and promotions. They will rationalize away privacy violations by appealing to their "good intentions" and their amazing ability to protect information from nefarious actors. In their minds they are working for "the good guys" who will surely "do the right thing."
At various times in the past, the teams involved in such projects have at least prototyped extremely invasive features with those in-home devices. For example, one engineer I've visited with from a well-known in-home device manufacturer worked on classifiers that could distinguish between two people having sex and one person attacking another in audio captured passively by the microphones.
As the corporate culture and leadership shifts over time I have marginal confidence that these prototypes will perpetually remain undeveloped or on-device only. Apple, for instance, has decided to send a significant amount of personal data to their "Private Cloud" and is taking the tactic of opening "enough" if its infrastructure for third-party audit to make an argument that the data they collect will only be used in a way that the user is aware and approves of. Maybe Apple can get something like that to a good enough state, at least for a time. However, they're inevitably normalizing the practice. I wonder how many competitors will be as equally disciplined in their implementations.
So my takeaway is this: If there exists a pathway between a microphone and the Internet that you are not in 100% control over, it's not at all unreasonable to expect that anything and everything that microphone picks up at any time will be captured and stored by someone else. What happens with that audio will -- in general -- be kept out of your knowledge and control so long as there is insufficient regulatory oversight.
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#208What is a good GPU to put in a home server that can run the TTS / STT and the local LLM required to make this shine?
A 3090 is too expensive and power hungry. Maybe a 3060 12Gb? Is there anything in the "workstation" lineup that is more efficient especially since I don't need the video outs?
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the Home assistant database (which is SQLite IIRC).
And there is no real API for you to interact with it. I would build my own config system if I could, but they don’t seem interested.
SQLite is highly automatable if you can deal with downtime to do your migrations.
I'm sure there are things they could do to better support the power-user engineer use case, but at the end of the day it's a self-hosted web app written in Python that has strong support for plugins. There should be very few things that an engineer couldn't figure out how to do between writing a plugin, tweaking source code, and just modifying files in place. And in the meantime I'm glad that it exists and apparently has enough traction to pay for itself.
Re: The era of open voice assistants
#210I'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 believe Mycroft was killed in part due to a patent troll:
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/02/13/linux_ai_assistan...
Hopefully the troll is no longer around