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The era of open voice assistants

home-assistant.io

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Re: The era of open voice assistants

#211

Post by antonyt »

IshKebab wrote: post #204

Looks great! The biggest issue I see is music. 90% of my use is "play some music" but none of the major streaming music providers offer APIs for obvious reasons. I'm not sure how you can get around that really.

To do this in Home Assistant, you'd probably want to run Music Assistant and integrate it in. Looks like they manage to support some streaming providers, not entirely sure how: https://music-assistant.io/music-providers/

Getting it to play the right thing from voice commands is a bit of a rabbit hole: https://music-assistant.io/integration/voice/

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#212

Post by singularity2001 »

singularity2001 wrote: post #77

sorry if this question takes away from the great strives the team went through but wouldn't it be much easier (hardware wise) to jailbreak one of the existing great hardware thingies like Apple HomePod or the Google one or Alexa?

or maybe find cheap Chinese smart speaker which is hackable?

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#213

Post by imiric »

gorbachev wrote: post #195
imiric wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That depends on the company. There is precedent of large companies keeping unprofitable projects alive because they can make up for it in other ways, or it's good for marketing, etc. I.e. the razor and blades business model.

Perhaps Echo/Alexa entice users to become Prime members, and they're not meant to be market leaders. We can only speculate as outsiders.

My point is that claiming that a product of one the richest companies on Earth is not as subjectively good as the competition because of financial reasons is far-fetched.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#215

Post by frognumber »

antonyt wrote: post #20
frognumber wrote: post #4

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…

You can do exactly that - set up an Assist pipeline that glues together services running wherever you want, including a GPU node for faster-whisper. The HA interface even has a screen where you can test your pipeline with your computer’s microphone. It’s not exactly batteries-included, and doesn’t exercise the on-device wake word detection that satellite hardware would provide, but it’s doable. But I don’t know that…

It's an upgrade mostly because putting on a headset to talk to an assistant means it's not worth using the assistant.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#216

Post by frognumber »

nickthegreek wrote: post #11
frognumber wrote: post #4

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…

The cloud sale is easy if you are an HA user already. If you don’t use Home Assistant right now, you probably rec it the target audience. I purchase the yearly cloud service as it’s an easy way to support HA development. It also gives you remote access to your system without having to do any setup. It provides an https connection which allows you to program esp32 devices through Chrome. And now they added the ability…

I don't mind paying for hardware. I do mind my privacy, and don't want that kind of information in the cloud, or even traces from encryption I haven't audited myself.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#217

Post by frognumber »

Jarwain wrote: post #14
frognumber wrote: post #4

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…

I can't speak to home assistant specifically, but the last time I looked at voice models, supporting multiple languages and doing it Really Well just happens to require a model with a massive amount of RAM, especially to run at anything resembling real-time. It's be awesome if they open sourced that model though, or published what models they're using. But I think it unlikely to happen because home assistant is a sor…

shrug whisper seems to do well on my GPU, and faster than realtime.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#218

Post by tedivm »

PhilippGille wrote: post #101
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…

> We need more projects like home assistant Isn't openHAB an existing popular alternative? https://www.openhab.org/

I think they meant "projects with a culture and mindset like homeassistant", not just a competitor to the existing project.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#219

Post by robotfelix »

geerlingguy wrote: post #116
Brendinooo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I invested in Mycroft and it flopped. Here’s hoping some others can go where they couldn’t.

IIRC one of the main devs behind this device came from Mycroft.

Yep, Mike Hansen was on the live stream launching the new device. He also notably created Rhasspy [1], which is open-source voice assistant software for Raspberry Pi (when connected to a microphone and speaker).

[1] https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#220

Post by lukifer »

antonyt wrote: post #34
danparsonson wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No wake words: it should listen to everything, process it, and understand when it's being addressed Even humans struggle with this one - that's what names are for!

Yeah, I’m having a hard time imagining how no-wake-word could work in practice.

This is one advantage of a system with a constrained set of commands/grammars, as opposed to the Alexa/Siri model of trying to process all arbitrary text while in active mode. It can simply ignore/discard any invocations which don't match those specific grammars (and no need to wait to confirm that the device is awake).

"Computer, turn lights to 50%" -> "turn lights to fifty percent" -> {action: "lights", value: 50}

"My new computer has a really beefy graphics card" -> "has a really beefy graphics card" -> {action: null}

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