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The era of open voice assistants

home-assistant.io

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Re: The era of open voice assistants

#161

Post by iamjackg »

dboreham wrote: post #158

It isn't even one year since the press stories about how dumb a product Alexa was and how it makes no money and all the devs are getting laid off. Something changed now?

Well, the various Echo devices were allegedly built as loss leaders in the hope people would use them to make orders on Amazon. This is backed by the most active open source project on GitHub, which already has extensive support for voice pipelines both with and without LLMs, and is likely priced sensibly.

A lot has changed in the open source ecosystem since commercial assistants were first launched. We have reliable open source wakeword detectors, and cheap/free LLMs can do the intent parsing, response generation, and even action calling.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#162

Post by weird-eye-issue »

dboreham wrote: post #158

It isn't even one year since the press stories about how dumb a product Alexa was and how it makes no money and all the devs are getting laid off. Something changed now?

Huh? Being able to do things like turn off lights or change the TV volume with your voice is actually quite a nice convenience

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#163

Post by iamjackg »

sofixa wrote: post #123
lolinder wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where and how are those configs stored? There has to be a backing representation somewhere, right?

In the Home assistant database (which is SQLite IIRC).

UI-generated configs are not stored in the database, they end up in a collection of JSON files in a .storage directory inside your config directory.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#164

Post by lokar »

sofixa wrote: post #123
lolinder wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where and how are those configs stored? There has to be a backing representation somewhere, right?

In the Home assistant database (which is SQLite IIRC).

And there is no real API for you to interact with it. I would build my own config system if I could, but they don’t seem interested.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#165

Post by lokar »

sofixa wrote: post #64
lokar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a great project overall, but I’ve been frustrated by how anti-engineer it has been trending.

Do you mean the move away from YAML first configs? I was originally somewhat frustrated, but overall, it's much better (let's be honest, YAML sucks) and more user friendly (by that I mean having a form with pre-filled fields is easier than having to copy paste YAML).

Yes, config is a major part of it. But also a lack of good APIs, very poor dev documentation, not great logging. A general “take it or leave it” attitude, not interesting in enabling engineers to build.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#167

Post by Jarwain »

choffee wrote: post #85
Jarwain wrote: post #7

I'm actually really excited for this! I noticed recently there weren't any good open source hardware projects for voice assistants with a focus on privacy. There's another project I've been thinking about where I think the privacy aspect is Important, and figuring out a good hardware stack has been a Process. The project I want to work on isn't exactly a voice assistant, but same ultimate hardware requirements Someth…

Not really sure what the benefit of group buy would be here. Nuba Casa, the company that supports the development of home assistant and developed this product, already has a few products they sell. They had this stocked all over the world for the announcement and it sold out. I assume they had already made a few thousand. They will get more stock now and it will sell just like the other things they make. Any profit f…

Heh thus far I've been an excited spectator of HomeAssistant, and wasn't aware of Nuba Casa until doing research for a different comment on the thread. I do love and appreciate their model here

I guess the benefits that came to mind are - alternative crowdsourced route for sourcing hardware, to avoid things like that raspberry pi shortage (although if it's due to broader supply chain issues then this doesn't necessarily help) - hardware forks! If someone wanted a version with a more powerful ESP32, or a GPS, or another mic, or an enclosure for a battery and charging and all that, took the time to fork the design to add these features, and found X other users interested in the fork to get it produced... (of course I might be betraying my ignorance on how easy it is to set up this sort of alternative manufacturing chain or what unit amounts are necessary to make this kind of forking economical)

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#168

Post by marcosdumay »

dboreham wrote: post #158

It isn't even one year since the press stories about how dumb a product Alexa was and how it makes no money and all the devs are getting laid off. Something changed now?

If it's not clear, the Home Assistant business plan is different from the Amazon one for Alexa... and the Home Assistant open source project is even more different.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#169

Post by gerdesj »

lokar wrote: post #44
thumbsup-_- wrote: post #6

We need more projects like home assistant. I started using it recently and was amazed. They sell their own hardware but the whole setup is designed to works on any other hardware. There are detailed docs for installation on your own hardware. And, it works amazingly well. Same for their voice assistant. You can but their hardware and get started right away or you can place your own mics and speakers around home and i…

It’s a great project overall, but I’ve been frustrated by how anti-engineer it has been trending.

Install the Node-RED add on. I use that to do the tricky stuff.

Install the whole thing on top of stock Debian "supervised" then you get a full OS to use.

You get a fully integrated MQTT broker with full provisioning - you don't need a webby API - you have an IoT one instead!

This is a madly fast moving project with a lot of different audiences. You still have loads of choice all tied up in the web interface.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#170

Post by sirtaj »

dboreham wrote: post #158

It isn't even one year since the press stories about how dumb a product Alexa was and how it makes no money and all the devs are getting laid off. Something changed now?

I've been using the HA cloud voice assistant on my phone for the past few weeks, and it's such a great change from Alexa, because integrating new services and adding sentences is actually possible.

Alexa, on the other hand, won't even allow a third party app to read its shopping list. It's no longer clear to me why Alexa even exists any more except as a kitchen timer.

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