171–180 of 290 posts
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Yeah, I’m having a hard time imagining how no-wake-word could work in practice.
Like that really annoying friend who jumps in every other sentence with "Well actually..."
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.
1. https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-a...
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?
So yeah, Alexa is a dumb product... for Amazon. No one uses Alexa to buy anything from Amazon because the only way you can be sure of what you're ordering from Amazon is to be looking at the site. Otherwise you might get cat food from "JOYFUNG BEST Brand 2024" and not Purina.
Voice Assistants for Home Automation, like what Home Assistant is offering, are awesome. And this in particular is exciting exactly because of Alexa's failure as a product. Amazon clearly does not care about Alexa now, its been getting worse as they try to shoehorn in more and more monetization strategies.
That's a pretty timely release considering Alexa and the Google assistant devices seem to have plateaued or are on the decline.
Curious what you mean by that.
In addition, it's a moron. I'm not sure it's actually gotten dumber, but in the age of chatgpt, asking google assistant for information is worse than asking my 2nd grader. Maybe it will be able to quote part of a relevant web page, but half the time it screws that up. I just want it to convert my voice to text, submit it to chatgpt or claude, and read the response back to me.
All that said, the audio quality is good and it shows pictures of my kid when idle. If they suddenly disappeared I would replace them.
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Our estimates are more than a million active instances https://analytics.home-assistant.io/
More than a million? It says on the page: "424,548 Active Home Assistant Installations" Am I missing something? Is it that these are just those you know are sharing details, and you can scale that up by a known percentage? :)
I'm also opted OUT of the analytics.
I’m assuming they eventually want to create their own LLM and something privacy focused would be good match for their customers. I don’t know how they feel about open source though
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…
I'm also very excited. I've had some ESP32 microphones before, but they were not really able to understand the wake word, sometimes even when it was quiet and you were sitting next to the mic. This one looks like it can recognize your voice very well, even when music is playing. Because... when it works, it's amazing. You get that Star Trek wake word (KHUM-PUTER!), you can connect your favorite LLM to it (ChatGPT, Cl…
(Yes, I do understand that "privacy" here is mostly about not sending it for processing to third parties.)
I don't fully understand the cloud upsell. I have a beefy GPU. I would like to run the "more advanced" models locally. By "I don't fully understand," I mean just that. There's a lot of marketing copy, but there's a lot I'd like to understand better before plopping down $$$ for a unit. The answers might be reasonable. Ideally, I'd be able to experiment with a headset first, and if it works well, upgrade to the $59 uni…
Finding microphones that look nice, can pick up voice at high enough quality to extract commands and that cover an entire room is surprisingly hard. If this device delivers on audio quality it's totally worth it at $59.
I started using the Box-3 with heywillow which did amazing input and processing using ML on my GPU, but the speaker is aweful. I build a speaker of my own using a raspberry pi Z2W, dac and some speakers in a 3d printed enclosure I designed, and added a shim to the server so that responses came from my speaker rather than the cheap/tiny speaker in the box-3. I'll likely do the same now with the Voice PE, but I'm hoping that the grove connector can be used to plonk it on top of a higher quality speaker unit and make it into a proper music player too.
As soon as I have it in my hands, I intend to get straight to work looking at a way to modify my speaker design to become an addon "module" for the PE.
I wonder how this compares to the Respeaker 2 https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/ReSpeaker_Mic_Array_v2.0/ The respeaker has 4 mics and can easily cancel out the noise introduced by a custom external speaker
It's worth noting that product is listed in the "Discontinued Products" section of the linked wiki. Both of the ReSpeaker products in the non-discontinued section (ReSpeaker Lite, ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT) have only 2 mics, so it appears that things are converging in that direction.
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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.