Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers

#1

Post by edward » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 9:57 AM UTC

Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
omgubuntu.co.uk

Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers

#2

Post by someonebaggy » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 10:04 AM UTC

I'm half surprised they are still around as they seem to never restock most of their products, and half pleased they are still around and releasing products.

Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers

#3

Post by pitchlatte » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 10:18 AM UTC

i just wonder how good it sounds. open audiophile grade hardware is something of a gap.

Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers

#4

Post by amelius » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 10:19 AM UTC

Does this use _local_ processing of voice commands?

Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers

#5

Post by joshstrange » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 10:23 AM UTC

I’ll wait for the reviews. I bought the Home Assistant Voice Preview device and it was underwhelming. Bad speaker, bad mic, bad pickup. I really wanted to like it but my Echo blew it out of the water.

I’m deep into the HA system so I cannot wait for Echo-quality that I can attach to my HA.

Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers

#6

Post by joshawash » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 10:37 AM UTC

[dead]

Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers

#7

Post by rjsw » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 10:44 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #4

Does this use _local_ processing of voice commands?

My reading of the documentation [1] is that everything is local.

[1] https://pine64.org/documentation/PineVoice/Software/

Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers

#8

Post by segbrk » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 10:46 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #4

Does this use _local_ processing of voice commands?

This is just a satellite device for Home Assistant (self-hosted) which you can set up to do processing however you’d like. There are cloud options for each stage of the pipeline (speech to text, LLM to turn text into tool calls, text to speech), but there are local options for all of that: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_loc...

Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers

#9

Post by itomato » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 11:02 AM UTC

pitchlatte wrote: post #3

i just wonder how good it sounds. open audiophile grade hardware is something of a gap.

It’s an off the shelf SOM.

Audiophiles are safe from this device.

Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers

#10

Post by simonmales » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 11:10 AM UTC

Would love for Pine64 to thrive.

I don't own any of their products, but I am glad they exist.