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The era of open voice assistants

home-assistant.io

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Re: The era of open voice assistants

#191

Post by ramses0 »

ncallaway wrote: post #72
philjohn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse though when you need to add a ton of custom sensors at once, e.g., for properly automating a Solar PV + Battery solution.

But like, isn't YAML still available for configuring things? Have they gotten rid of any YAML configs, with things that are now UI only? My understanding was that they've just been building more UI for configuring things and so now default recommend people away from YAML (which seems like the right choice to me).

For "integrated" stuff, their stance is "UI Must Work". Tracing down the requirements, here:

    https://design.home-assistant.io/#concepts/home
    https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/configuration_yaml_index
    https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/blob/master/adr/0010-integration-configuration.md
...usually there's YAML kicking around the backend, but for normal usage, normal users, the goal is to be able to configure all (most) things via UI.

I've had to drop to YAML to configure (eg) writing stats to indexdb/graphana vs. sqlite (or something), or maybe to drop in or update an API_KEY or non-standard host/port, but 99% of the time the config is baroque, but usable via the web-app.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#192

Post by entropicdrifter »

staunton wrote: post #183
nine_k wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a side note, it always slightly puzzles me when I see "voice interface" and "private" used together. Maybe it takes living alone to issue voice commands and feel some privacy. (Yes, I do understand that "privacy" here is mostly about not sending it for processing to third parties.)

> Yes, I do understand that "privacy" here is mostly about not sending it for processing to third parties. Then why does it puzzle you?

Because you wouldn't ask it deeply private questions in front of your mom, for instance

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#193

Post by Carrok »

hn92726819 wrote: post #180
Carrok wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, you're right. That is a weird request then, or I don't understand it either. I didn't realize something like [1] goes inside your switch. I was expecting a switch with a faceplate combined. 1: https://us.shelly.com/products/shelly-1-gen3

They also make what you’re describing.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#194

Post by baq »

sirtaj wrote: post #170
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.

They must be working on a LLM backend for it so it isn't dumb as a rock.

Nothing makes sense otherwise, agreed.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#195

Post by gorbachev »

imiric wrote: post #91
freedomben wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems ridiculous to me that this comment is so down voted. It's a thoughtful and interesting comment, and contains a reasonable and even likely explanation for what we've seen, once one puts aside the bottom that Amazon is just evil, which isn't a useful way to think of you truly want to understand the world and motivations. I'm guessing people reflexively down vote because they hate Amazon and it could read like…

I didn't downvote it, but claiming that Echo/Alexa are behind because of financial reasons is misguided at best. Amazon is one of the richest companies on the planet, with vast datacenters that power large parts of the internet. If they wanted to improve their AI products they certainly have the resources to do so.

Even the richest company in the world doesn't run unprofitable projects forever.

Just see Killed by Google.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#196

Post by inquirerGeneral »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #192
staunton wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, I do understand that "privacy" here is mostly about not sending it for processing to third parties. Then why does it puzzle you?

Because you wouldn't ask it deeply private questions in front of your mom, for instance

[dead]

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#198

Post by balloob »

sreejithr wrote: post #197

Genuine question - How hackable is this? Can I have the voice commands redirected to my backend server where I can process it as I please?

This is Home Assistant. Everything is hackable.

Inside Home Assistant the processing is delegated to integrations providing Speech-to-Text, command processing, Text-to-Speech. You can make custom integrations for all of them

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#199

Post by creeble »

IgorPartola wrote: post #124
oaththrowaway wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s interesting because I have a bunch of Echos of various types in my house and my timers and answers are instant. Is it possible your internet connection is wonky or you have a slow DNS server or congested Wi-Fi? I don’t have the absolute newest devices but the one in my bedroom is the very original Echo that I got during their preview stage, the one in my kitchen is the Echo Show 7” and I have a bunch of puck o…

I too get pretty consistent response and answers from Alexa these days. There has been some vague decline in the quality of answers (I think sometime back they removed the ability to ask for Wikipedia data), but have no trouble with timers and the few linked wemo switches I have.

I’m also the author of an Alexa skill for a music player (basic “transport” control mostly) that i use every day, and it still works the same as it always did.

Occasionally I’ll get some freakout answer or abject failure to reply, but it’s fairly rare. I did notice it was down for a whole weekend once; that’s surely related to staffing or priorities.

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