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

Post by ash_091 » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 12:29 PM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #116

hamdingers wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I have to go to a thing and push a button, I'd rather the button do the thing I wanted in the first place. Voice assistants are for when my hands are full or I don't want to get up. (I wrote more about my home automation philosophy in another comment[1]). Also I have all my voice assistant devices mounted to the ceiling 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47399909

What if you have two things? You'd then need two buttons. The push button is a perfectly viable option, it just needs to be in a form factor that's works. Could be as simple as a tiny low-energy Bluetooth board with a coin battery that will last several months.

Post by freedomben » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #101

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…

On the plus side, mine misdetected a wake word during a funny conversation and said "Sorry, I can't find any area called _____[60 second repeat of funny conversation]___" and it made my family laugh harder than we've laughed in a really long time. I even went into the tts cache and saved the wav b/c it was sooo funny.

Post by bronco21016 » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

mlrtime wrote: post #127

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

Post by homeonthemtn » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC

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…

Post by leftytak » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

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…