I've been having a lot of fun using my old Mycroft AI device. Neon is the new software package. It didn't solve the issues highlighted in this thread, but it is a fun open device to hack on. I wrote a little web app that will speak in the standard voice and say things like "hey kids, I'm AI and know everything, and your dad is really cool." They love to yell at me when I do that.
My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
71–80 of 153 posts
Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
Makes a lot of sense :) thanks for the update.
I'll try to remember to creepy stalk you for updates as the device sounds great!
Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
#73actually 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 t…
80% of my home voice assistant requests really need no response other than an affirmative sound effect.
Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
#74I've recently purchased a couple of the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition devices, and they leave a lot to be desired. The wake word detection isn't great, and the audio quality is abysmal (for voice responses, not music). Amazon has ruined their Alexa and Echo devices with ads and annoying nag messages. I'd really like an open alternative, but the basics are lacking right now.
Can those devices (Amazon) be _jail broken_? I was just wondering that this morning while taking a shower.
Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 rec…
You are reporting on a deliberately curated effort vs. what I understand is effectively voluntary data donation without incentives. It's not surprising to me that the later dataset ends up biased due to the differences in sourcing.
Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
#76actually 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 t…
> 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.
I would argue that the hardest part is correctly recognizing that it's being addressed. 98% of my frustration with voice assistants is them not responding when spoken to. The other 2% is realizing I want them to stop talking.
Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
#77actually 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 t…
80% of my home voice assistant requests really need no response other than an affirmative sound effect.
100% agree. I dont want a Yes, Got it, Will do or even worse, I have turned on the Bedroom Light. I want soft success ding or a low failure boop.
Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
#78Do 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…
[deleted]
Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
#79Do 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 don't. I pretty much don't like talking in general, especially if I'm alone. Accordingly, no voice assistants; I don't think I've ever triggered one except accidentally.
Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
Makes a lot of sense :) thanks for the update. I'll try to remember to creepy stalk you for updates as the device sounds great!
You can sign up to my mailing list to get emails if you want! It's at the end of each post.