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The era of open voice assistants

home-assistant.io

231–240 of 290 posts

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#231
post #26
post #25

While we are getting shoveled AI keyword everywhere, I'm actually disappointed I don't see it here. The first thought I had when encountering LLM was that it can finally make these devices understand you and make them finally useful... and I don't need to know some presceipted keywords.

You can actually integrate LLMs with Assist pipelines, it’s just orthogonal to this hardware announcement. Check out https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/06/05/release-20246/...

It's also really cool. You can make it so that the home assistant itself first tries to understand what you do, like turning on the living room lights or setting the bathroom temperature to 21.5 degrees celsius. If the assistant pipeline does not understand what you are asking for, it can send your question to the LLM of your choice. You can also make the LLM to control the lights, heat etc, but at least for now ChatGPT is pretty bad with that. So let home assistant do the home automation, and then let ChatGPT to answer your questions about the most popular ruler in the 19th century France.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#232
My wife and I have been very happy with Home Assistant so far. The one thing we're missing is voice control, and until now it seemed like there just wasn't a clean solution for HA voice control. You were stuck doing some hobbyist shenanigans and hand-writing boatloads of YAML, or you were hooking up a HomeKit/Alexa which defeats the purpose of HA. This is a game-changer.

They recommend an N100 in the blog post, but I might buy one anyway to see if my HA box's Celeron J3455 will do the job.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#233

Is anyone aware of an effort to repurpose Echo hardware to do HA voice?

I've looked into this, and found nothing. One can surely repurpose the case and speakers, but the microphones are soldered on-board, and the board is not hackable and needs to go. To best of my awareness, there are no ways to load a custom firmware on a newer Echo device - they're locked down pretty tight.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A group buy for an existing product makes sense. Want to buy a 24TB Western Digital hard drive? It’s $350. But if you and your 1000 closest friends get together the price can be $275. But for a first time unknown product? You get a lot fewer interested parties. Lots of people want to wait for tech reviews and blog posts before committing to it. And group buys being the only way to get them means availability will be…

>> I want 5-20, one for every space in my house. I don't have a small house, but I'm trying to think why I would need even 5 of these, let alone 20. The majority of the time my family spends together is in the open layout on our main floor where the kitchen flows into the living room with an adjacent sun room off the living room. I'm genuinely curious why you need so many of these. I do agree that if you do have a le…

Just using where I might want it in childhood home as an example - master bedroom - master bathroom - grandma's room - my room - brother's room - upstairs bathroom - upstairs loft? - office room - living room/diningroom - kitchen/kitchentable/familyroom - garage?

9-14 devices for a 5 person household. May be a stretch since I'm not sure if my grandma could even really use it. Bathroom's a stretch but I'm imagining being in the shower and wanting to note multiple showerthoughts

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I believe Mycroft was killed in part due to a patent troll: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/02/13/linux_ai_assistan... Hopefully the troll is no longer around

I think another part is that there is a failure mechanism on their boards that was recently identified: https://community.openconversational.ai/t/sj-201-sj201-failu...

The short version, from the post, is that there are 4 capacitors that are only rated for 6.3v, but the power supply is 12v. Eventually one of these capacitors will fail, causing the board to stop working entirely.

It would be hard for a company to stay in business when they are fighting a patent troll lawsuit and having to handle returns on every device they sold through kickstarter.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#236
post #173

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?

Amazon lost 25 billion dollars on Alexa (between 2017 and 2021, from WSJ https://archive.is/uMTOB ). Selling the hardware at a loss and I imagine a bigger portion was the thousands of people they had working in that division. 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 sit…

> the only way you can be sure of what you're ordering from Amazon is to be looking at the site

Ah . . . an optimist!

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#238
Nice. A totally local voice assistant.

This makes sense for cars, where there's much local stuff to control. But for a home unit, what do you want to do that is entirely local? Turning the heat up and down gets boring after a while. If it does entertainment selection or shopping, it needs outside world connections.

(Today's rant: I recently purchased a humidifier. It's just a little unit with a water tank, a water-softening filter, and an ultrasonic vaporizer. That part works fine. Then there are the controls.

All this thing really needs is an on-off switch and a humidity knob, and maybe lights for power, humidification, and water tank empty. But no. It has five touch buttons and a round display about four inches across. The display is on even if the unit is off. Pressing the on/off button turns it on. If it's humidifying, there's a whole light show. The tank lights up purple. Swooping arcs of blue run up both edges of the round display. It's very impressive, especially in a dark bedroom. If you press and hold the second button for two seconds, about half the light show is suppressed.

There are three fan speeds, and a button for that. Only the highest one will propel the water vapor high enough to avoid it hitting the floor and uselessly condensing before it mixes with the air. So that feature was not necessary.

The display shows one number. It's usually the current humidity, but if you press the humidity set button, the number displayed becomes the setting, which is changed upwards by successive presses until it wraps around. After a few seconds, the display reverts to current humidity.

Turning the unit off or removing the water tank resets all settings to the default.

This is the low-end unit. The next step up comes with an IR remote. It's one way - the remote has buttons but no display. Since you have to be close to the display to use the buttons effectively, that doesn't help much. The step up after that is, inevitably, a cloud-based phone app.

So this thing could potentially be interfaced to a voice assistant. That's only useful if there's enough information coming back from the device that the assistant software knows what the device is doing, and the assistant software understands that device status. If all it does is send remote button pushes, the result will be frustration.

So you need some degree of intelligence at both ends - the end that talks to the human, and the end that talks to the device. If the user says "House, it's too dry in here", the assistant system needs to be able to check the status of the humidifier. Has power? Talking? On? Humidity setting reasonable? Fan running? Tank not empty? If it can't do that, it's part of the problem, not part of the solution.)

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#239

Nice. A totally local voice assistant. This makes sense for cars, where there's much local stuff to control. But for a home unit, what do you want to do that is entirely local? Turning the heat up and down gets boring after a while. If it does entertainment selection or shopping, it needs outside world connections. (Today's rant: I recently purchased a humidifier. It's just a little unit with a water tank, a water-so…

> what do you want to do that is entirely local?

Keeping my daily life from becoming public? These companies can't be trusted with the information they have. Why should I give them more that they can leak?

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#240

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).

Yes - for now. I think the ultimate end-goal is to get rid of the YAML config files, which, makes sense for the median user, but not for power users.

For example, I have my config on GitHub and share various YAML blueprints with a friend who also has the same Solar+Battery system as I do.

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