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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)

#121

Post by IX-103 »

kbuck wrote: post #86

I bought a Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition to try out. It's surprisingly good, but still falls short when compared to Google Home speakers: - Wake word detection isn't as good as the Google Homes (more false positives, more false negatives - so I can't just tune sensitivity). - Mic and speakers are both of poor quality in comparison to Google Home devices. - Flow is awkward. On a Google Home device, you can say…

> it seems like the Google Home devices start buffering immediately after the wake word, but the Voice PE doesn't.

Google Home devices are always buffering. The wake word just tells it to look back in the buffer and start processing.

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

#122

Post by JohnTheNerd »

stavros wrote: post #103
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…

Train a custom wakeword with this? https://github.com/TaterTotterson/microWakeWord-Trainer-Nvid...

or if you have an Apple Silicon Mac, this: https://github.com/TaterTotterson/microWakeWord-Trainer-Appl...

I used it personally, did a lot of research (including asking questions to the creator of microWakeWord), and submitted an upstream PR (I think it's already merged), which improved the resulting model slightly. I imagine the Nvidia version is similar, but I don't have experience with it. I also noticed that the model is so small (~25000 parameters), the actual training part doesn't even noticably improve with the GPU, only the TTS voice generation really only uses it.

if you are using this, I strongly recommend you create lots of personal samples with the recorder. I personally used 400, 200 from myself and 200 from my partner, with varying moods and in all the rooms we plan on using the assistant. I am considering re-training with more samples. it takes effort, but the resulting model seems to be well worth it.

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

#123

Post by mlrtime »

hamdingers wrote: post #14
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 consider each time I need to pull out my phone and "do it myself" to be a failure of my smart home system. If a light cannot be automatically on when I need it (like a motion sensor) or controlled with a dedicated button within arms reach (like a remote on my desk) then the third best option is one that lets me control it without interrupting what I'm doing, moving from where I am, using my hands, or possessing any…

Do you have a wife / kids? If so how do you "teach" them this?

My point being that it might be a failure to you but not them, some people don't want it.

This is my struggle, how to get the automation to do what I want without affecting everyone else equally. (And vise versa)

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

#124

Post by mlrtime »

voidUpdate wrote: post #33
johannes1234321 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sun moves around, while I am in a room. It might be high up when I enter a room, but after a while there may be clouds or it may have set. When watching a movie one may dimthe light. Once finished one may need more lights. When going to bed I may want to switch all lights off. When getting up it may need some extra light. A switch on the door is nice. More switches is better. Being able to control from anywhere m…

So I grab my phone, open the homeassistant app, and mess with the settings on my light, or use homeassistant through my browser on my desktop. No yelling at a computer needed

I think you missed the top post "If I have to pull my phone out = failure" part.

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

#126

Post by mlrtime »

stavros wrote: post #80
CurleighBraces wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you for the blog/updates.

Since you're deep into this space, Do you use wall mount dashboards? There seems to be two camps now: Dashboards everywhere or none at all.

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

#127

Post by mlrtime »

ethagnawl wrote: post #41
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'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 thought all people's voice had to be trained, and if you didn't go through it the match % was much smaller.

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

#128

Post by stavros »

JohnTheNerd wrote: post #122
stavros wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Train a custom wakeword with this? https://github.com/TaterTotterson/microWakeWord-Trainer-Nvid...

or if you have an Apple Silicon Mac, this: https://github.com/TaterTotterson/microWakeWord-Trainer-Appl... I used it personally, did a lot of research (including asking questions to the creator of microWakeWord), and submitted an upstream PR (I think it's already merged), which improved the resulting model slightly. I imagine the Nvidia version is similar, but I don't have experience with it. I also noticed that the…

Oh wow, 200 each? I just deployed it to the device, but I trained with 10. I'll need to redo it if it doesn't work well, but so far so good.

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

#129

Post by TeMPOraL »

colechristensen wrote: post #81
nickthegreek wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Star Trek got it right. two beeps, "Low High" = yup, "High Low" = nope

Also "High High" == affirmative.

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

#130

Post by alias_neo »

bachittle wrote: post #91
ljclifford wrote: post #67

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 t…

Coqui TTS is actually deprecated, the company shut down. I have a voice assistant that is using gpt-5.4 and opus 4.6 using the subsidized plans from Codex and Claude Code, and it uses STT and TTS from mlx-audio for those portions to be locally hosted: https://github.com/Blaizzy/mlx-audio Here are the following models I found work well: - Qwen ASR and TTS are really good. Qwen ASR is faster than OpenAI Whisper on Appl…

Do you know which HA integration I would use if I want to try out Qwen 3 ASR in HA? Some screenshots in the OP reference Qwen 3 ASR for STT but I can't seem to find any reference to which integration I'd use.
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