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My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

community.home-assistant.io

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Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#61

Post by bigstrat2003 »

recursive wrote: post #39
phito wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also needs to work at least 99% of the time if not more. Not easy to do this with indeterministic models.

If my lights and heat were 99% reliable, I'd be getting new lights and heat.

In those cases yeah, 99% isn't reliable enough. I'm not going to tolerate having power down for 3 days out of the year. But in fairness, home automation is less critical than that so 99% reliability is still acceptable to me. I don't think LLMs are anywhere near that, though, nor is there any sign of them getting there any time soon. So it does concern me to use an LLM as the backbone of home automation.

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#62

Post by CurleighBraces »

stavros wrote: post #58
tomComb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pebble index seems like the optimal form for this. https://repebble.com/index Could be pressed even if your hands were busy.

If you want to relax some constraints, I made something similar for $10: https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/

Did you have any luck with the power issues on the new board?

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#63

Post by stavros »

CurleighBraces wrote: post #62
stavros wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to relax some constraints, I made something similar for $10: https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/

Did you have any luck with the power issues on the new board?

The new board hasn't come yet, but a friend gave me a great idea, to power the mic from a GPIO, which powers it off completely when the ESP is off.

Hopefully the new boards will be here soon, but another issue is that I don't really have anything that can measure microamp consumption, so any testing takes days of waiting for the battery to run down :(

I do think these clones are the issue, though. They had a LED I couldn't turn off, so they'd literally shine forever. They don't seem engineered for low quiescent current, so fingers crossed with the new ones.

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#64

Post by phatskat »

voidUpdate wrote: post #4

Do people like talking to voice assistants? I've used one occasionally (mostly for timers when I'm cooking), but most of the time it would be faster for me to just do it myself, and feels much less awkward than talking to empty air, asking it to do things for me. It might be because I just really don't like making more noise than I have to (Yes, I appreciate that some people may be disabled in such a way that it make…

I pretty much only use them for timers and weather, and the occasional lookup for quick random info. And this is all only if I don’t have a phone handy or eg the toddler is going to timeout and I need to set his timer in the midst of him having a meltdown about it.

It’s why I haven’t and won’t enable Gemini, and I’ll likely chuck my nest minis once I’m forced to have an LLM-based experience. Hopefully they’ll be able to at least function as dumb Bluetooth speakers still but I’m not holding out hope on that end

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#65

Post by bombcar »

recursive wrote: post #39
phito wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also needs to work at least 99% of the time if not more. Not easy to do this with indeterministic models.

If my lights and heat were 99% reliable, I'd be getting new lights and heat.

I took 99% reliable as meaning not having to repeat the command, which given that Siri is something like 50% reliable by that metric, 99% sounds like heaven.

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#66

Post by robotswantdata »

hamdingers wrote: post #10

If you're less concerned about privacy, I use Gemini 2.5 Flash for this and it's exceptionally good and fast as a HA assistant while being much cheaper than the electricity that would be needed to keep a 3090 awake. The thing that kills this for me (and they even mentioned it) is wake word detection. I have both the HA voice preview and FPH Satellite1 devices, plus have experimented with a few other options like a Ra…

What about your wifi APs sensing which room you are in, with your choice of hilarious dance moves as the trigger ?

Funky chicken for Gemini

Penguin dance for OpenAI

Claude?

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#67

Post by ljclifford »

actually the hardest part of a locally hosted voice assistant isn't the llm. it's making the tts tolerable to actually talk to every day.

the core issue is prosody: kokoro and piper are trained on read speech, but conversational responses have shorter breath groups and different stress patterns on function words. that's why numbers, addresses, and hedged phrases sound off even when everything else works.

the fix is training data composition. conversational and read speech have different prosody distributions and models don't generalize across them. for self-hosted, coqui xtts-v2 [1] is worth trying if you want more natural english output than kokoro.

btw i'm lily, cofounder of rime [2]. we're solving this for business voice agents at scale, not really the personal home assistant use case, but the underlying problem is the same.

[1] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS [2] https://rime.ai

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#68

Post by xp84 »

alex_young wrote: post #15
dewey wrote: post #2

Their first version is most likely already 10x better than Siri. > Understands when it is in a particular area and does not ask “which light?” when there is only one light in the area, but does correctly ask when there are multiple of the device type in the given area.

One of my favorite episodes: I set 2 timers for the same thing somehow. I then tried to cancel one of them. >“Siri, cancel the second timer” “You have 2 timers running, would you like me to cancel one of them?” >“Yes” “Yes is an English rock band from the 70s…” >“Siri, please cancel the timer with 2 minutes and 10 seconds on it” “Would you like me to cancel the timer with 2 minutes and 8 seconds on it?” >“Yes” “Yes i…

Helping my kid get ready for shower I had this exchange:

Me: "Text Jane Would you mind dropping down the robe and underpants"

Siri: Sends Jane "Would you mind dropping down"

Me: rolls eyes "Text Jane robe and underpants"

Siri: "I don't see a Jane Robe in your contacts."

Me: wishes I could drown Siri in the bathtub

It's wild to me that Apple got the ability to do the actual speech-to-text part pretty much 100% solved more than half a decade ago, yet struggles in 2026 to turn streams of very simple, correctly-transcribed text into intents in ways that even a local model can figure out. Siri is good STT, a bunch of serviceable APIs that can control lots of stuff, with the digital equivalent of a brain-damaged cat sitting at the center of it guaranteeing the worst possible experience.

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#69

Post by dghlsakjg »

vineyardmike wrote: post #49
ethagnawl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's been surprising in my experience regarding the wake word is that it recognizes me (adult male) saying the wake word ~95% of the time. However, it only registers the rest of my family (women and children) ~30% of the time.

I have no firsthand knowledge, but I’d strongly bet that the home-assistant effort to donate training data is mostly get adult males, and nearly zero children.

This was 2021 (so pre-llm), but I used to work for a company that gathered data for training voice commands (Alexa, Toyota, Sonos, were some clients). Basically, we paid people to read digital assistant scripts at scale.

Your assumptions about training data do not match the demographics of data I collected. The majority of what our work revolved around was getting diversity into the training data. We specifically recruited kids, older folks, women, people with accented/dialected English and just about every variety of speech that we could get our hands on. The companies we worked with were insanely methodical about ensuring that different people were included.

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#70

Post by otikik »

hamdingers wrote: post #27
senkora wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use an easier to detect wake “word”, like two claps in quick succession? Or a couple of notes of a melody?

Can't clap if your hands are full and I would not subject my family to my attempts at delivering a melody. I haven't tried training my own wake word though, I'm tempted to see if it improves things.

What about whistling?
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