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The era of open voice assistants

home-assistant.io

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Re: The era of open voice assistants

#221

Post by Jarwain »

frognumber wrote: post #217
Jarwain wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to home assistant specifically, but the last time I looked at voice models, supporting multiple languages and doing it Really Well just happens to require a model with a massive amount of RAM, especially to run at anything resembling real-time. It's be awesome if they open sourced that model though, or published what models they're using. But I think it unlikely to happen because home assistant is a sor…

shrug whisper seems to do well on my GPU, and faster than realtime.

Found what I was thinking of [1]

Part of my misremembering is I was thinking of smaller/iot usecase which, alongside the 10GB VRAM requirements for the large multilingual model, felt infeasible -shrug-

[1] https://git.acelerex.com/automation/opcua.ts/-/project_membe...

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#222

Post by lukifer »

leeoniya wrote: post #75

anyone tried https://getleon.ai/ ?

I tried years ago, I don't think I got it working, ended up using Rhasspy/voice2json instead (TIL: the creator of both is now the Voice Eng Lead for Home Assistant).

Looks like the GitHub is still somewhat active, although their roadmap links to a dead Trello: https://github.com/leon-ai/leon

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#223

Post by comradesmith »

steelframe wrote: post #207

If 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 nefa…

Open source

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#224

Post by burningChrome »

IgorPartola wrote: post #33
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…

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…

>> I want 5-20, one for every space in my house.

I don't have a small house, but I'm trying to think why I would need even 5 of these, let alone 20. The majority of the time my family spends together is in the open layout on our main floor where the kitchen flows into the living room with an adjacent sun room off the living room.

I'm genuinely curious why you need so many of these.

I do agree that if you do have a legit use case for so many, buying so many in essentially a first run is a risky thing. Coupled with the ability for this to be supported for more than a fleeting couple of years is also a huge risk.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#225

Post by pimeys »

iteria wrote: post #205
nine_k wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How these ESP32-systems work is that you send a wake word to the device itself. It can detect the word without an internet connection, the device itself understands it and wakes up. After the device is woken up, it sends your speech to home assistant, which either

  - handles it locally, if you have fast enough computer
  - sends it to home assistant cloud, if you set it up
  - sends it to chatgpt, claude sonnet etc. if you set it up
I'm planning on building a proxmox rack server next year, so I'm probably going to just handle all the discussions locally. The home assistant cloud is quite private too, at least that's what they say (and they're in EU, so I think there might be truth in what they say)...

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#226

Post by pimeys »

nine_k wrote: post #177
pimeys wrote: post #108

Earlier 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.)

Private meaning that a big American corporation is not listening and using my voice to either track me or teach their own AI service with it.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#227

Post by silentOpen »

bradly wrote: post #135

Are there any MacOS software versions of this? I've been looking for opensource wake-work for a "Hey Siri"-like integration, but I'm very apprehensive of anything, malicious or not, monitoring the sound input for a specific word in an efficient way.

OpenWakeWord has worked well for me especially using well-trained models like “Hey, Mycroft”.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#228

Post by throwawayq3423 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #37
jfim wrote: post #3

That'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.

Google and Amazon refuse to put GenAI into their existing speakers (which barely function). No doubt they want a new product launch to charge more.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#229

Post by gh02t »

comradesmith wrote: post #223
steelframe wrote: post #207

If 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 nefa…

Open source

Yeah, OP is comparing this to Google/Amazon/Apple/etc devices but this is being developed by the nonprofit that manages development on Home Assistant and in cooperation with their large community of users. It's a very different attitude driving development of voice remotes for Home Assistant vs. large corporations. They've been around for a while now and have a proven track record of being actual, serious advocates for data privacy and user autonomy. Maybe they won't be forever, but then this thing is open source.

The whole point is that you control what these things do, and that you can run these things fully locally if you want with no internet access, and run your own custom software on them if that's what you want to do. This is a product for the Home Assistant community that will probably never turn much of a profit, nor do I expect it is intended to.

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