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The era of open voice assistants

home-assistant.io

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Re: The era of open voice assistants

#141

Post by jazzyjackson »

Carrok wrote: post #136
timdiggerm wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've misunderstood what they're asking for. They're asking for Home Assistant hardware (microphone, speaker, wifi) that, instead of being a standalone box taking up space on the counter/table/etc, fits into the hole in the hall where they currently have a lightswitch.

I guess I did misunderstand, because that request seems strange to me. I’m assuming they have more than one switch. Which one should have Home Assistant on it? Seems like an odd deployment strategy. A pi isn’t that big..

Not OP but if I have to have a CPU and microphone for voice commands anyway it doesn’t sound crazy to throw a whole pi/relay node into every room of the house that I want to have control of. Pi zero 2 is fifteen bucks and can run Whisper speech2text iirc, throw ChatScript on there for local command decoding and call it a day. I think I’d pay 50 to 100 per room for the convenience, paying a premium to not have my voice surveilled by Alexa just to set timers.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#142

Post by mrweasel »

oaththrowaway wrote: post #40
IgorPartola wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what you mean by that.

For me the Alexa devices I own have gotten worse. Can't do simple things (setting a timer used to be instant, now it takes 10-15 seconds of thinking assuming it heard properly), playing music is a joke (will try to play through Deezer even though I disaled that integration months ago, and then will default to Amazon Music instead of Spotify which is set as the default). And then even simple skills can't understand wh…

Amazon also fired a large number of people from the Alexa team last year. I don't really think Alexa is a major priority for Amazon at this point.

I don't blame them, sure there are millions of devices out there, but some people might own five device. So there aren't as many users as there are devices and they aren't making them any money once bought, not like the Kindle.

Frankly I know shockingly few people who uses Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant/Bixby. It's not that voice assistants don't have a use, be it is a much much small use case than initially envisioned and there's no longer the money to found the development, the funds went into blockchain and LLMs. Partly the decline is because it's not as natural an interface as we expected, secondly: to be actually useful, the assistants need access to control things that we may not be comfortable with, or which may pose a liability to the manufacturers.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#143

Post by jazzyjackson »

moffkalast wrote: post #139
Carrok wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I did misunderstand, because that request seems strange to me. I’m assuming they have more than one switch. Which one should have Home Assistant on it? Seems like an odd deployment strategy. A pi isn’t that big..

Not the home assistant controller, but a peripheral. A light switch you can toggle manually or through the assistant. I think the problem with this setup is that it needs to be wifi connected, and if you embed an esp32 inside a wall it will get exactly zero signal. Maybe with external antennas hidden in the switch outer case.

? I have my house packed to the brim with tplink Wi-Fi smart switches, they work fine.

https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/smart-switch/

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#144

Post by cachvico »

bdavbdav wrote: post #69
IgorPartola wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what you mean by that.

GH is basically abandonware at this stage it seems. They just seem to break random things, and there haven’t been any major updates / features for ages (and Gemini is still a way off for most).

Google Home's Nest integration is recent and top-notch though.

Hopefully in a year they'll have rolled out the Gemini integration and things will be back on track.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#145

Post by Carrok »

moffkalast wrote: post #139
Carrok wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I did misunderstand, because that request seems strange to me. I’m assuming they have more than one switch. Which one should have Home Assistant on it? Seems like an odd deployment strategy. A pi isn’t that big..

Not the home assistant controller, but a peripheral. A light switch you can toggle manually or through the assistant. I think the problem with this setup is that it needs to be wifi connected, and if you embed an esp32 inside a wall it will get exactly zero signal. Maybe with external antennas hidden in the switch outer case.

The switches I linked are esp32. They live inside the wall. They get great signal.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#146

Post by Carrok »

hn92726819 wrote: post #137
Carrok wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I did misunderstand, because that request seems strange to me. I’m assuming they have more than one switch. Which one should have Home Assistant on it? Seems like an odd deployment strategy. A pi isn’t that big..

No I don't think that's it either. Home assistant runs on a server somewhere still. What the top level comment is asking for, completely unrelated to the article mind you, is to have a smart device in the form factor of a light switch that you can hook into your home assistant system. The problem they likely have (I have it too) is that you set HA up and it can control smart plugs, smart thermostats, etc, but it can'…

So my original comment was not a misunderstanding. They are smart switch drop in replacements.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#147

Post by throwaway4220 »

ragmondo wrote: post #128

My plea / request : Make a home assistant a DROP IN replacement for a standard light switch. It has power, its adds functionality from the get-go (smart lighting), it’s placed in a convenient position for the room and no extra wires etc required.

Would a zigbee or z wave switch fit your needs? It’s “offline” but does need a hub

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#148

Post by moffkalast »

geerlingguy wrote: post #117
moooo99 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, comparatively many people are hosting their home Assistant on an raspberry Pi so it is relatively powerful :D

And the CM5 is nearly equivalent in terms of the small models you run. Latency is nearly the same, though you can get a little more fancy if you have an N100 system with more RAM, and "unlocked" thermals (many N100 systems cap the power draw because they don't have the thermal capacity to run the chip at max turbo).

If we're being fair you can more like, walk models, not run them :)

An 125H box may be three times the price of an N100 box, but the power draw is about the same (6W idle, 28W max, with turbo off anyway) and with the Arc iGPU the prompt processing is in the hundreds, so near instant replies to longer queries are doable.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#149

Post by jazzyjackson »

joshstrange wrote: post #41
shaklee3 wrote: post #39

As someone not that familiar with haas, can someone explain why there's not a clear path to replace Alexa or Google home? I considered using haas recently to get a gpt like response after being frustrated with Google home, but it seems this is a complete mess. is there a way to get this yet?

> explain why there's not a clear path to replace Alexa or Google home? There is. I've used HA with their default assist pipeline (Cloud HA STT, Cloud HA LLM, Cloud HA TTS) and I've also plugged in different providers at each step (both remote and local for each part: STT/LLM/TTS) and it's super cool. Their default LLM isn't great but it works, plugging in OpenAI made it work way better. My local models weren't great…

What does it use LLMs for?

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#150

Post by joshstrange »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #149
joshstrange wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> explain why there's not a clear path to replace Alexa or Google home? There is. I've used HA with their default assist pipeline (Cloud HA STT, Cloud HA LLM, Cloud HA TTS) and I've also plugged in different providers at each step (both remote and local for each part: STT/LLM/TTS) and it's super cool. Their default LLM isn't great but it works, plugging in OpenAI made it work way better. My local models weren't great…

What does it use LLMs for?

Taking the text of what you said and figuring out what you want to do. It sends what you said plus a list of devices/states and a list of functions (to turn off/on, set temp, etc of devices). The LLM takes "Turn off basement lights" and turns that into "{function: "call_service", args: ['lights.on', 'entity-id-123']}" (<- Completely made up but it's something like that) that it passes back to HA along with what to say back to the user ("Lights turned off" or whatever) and HA will run the function and then do TTS to respond to you.
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