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The era of open voice assistants

home-assistant.io

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Re: The era of open voice assistants

#241

Post by paradox460 »

gerdesj wrote: post #169
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.

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.

Or the Digital alchemy addon. Let's you write your automations using typescript

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#242

Post by xandrius »

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

There are levels of privacy. Because I'm not going to ask deeply private questions, it doesn't mean that I want everyone to be snooping into what I'm planning to eat tonight.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#243

Post by Limeray »

lukifer wrote: post #220
antonyt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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}…

[dead]

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#244

Post by acidburnNSA »

Animats wrote: post #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-so…

Self hosted isn't always local only. I have a vpn server on my home router and control my home assistant worldwide. No corporation controls my access or data.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#246

Post by danparsonson »

fragmede wrote: post #53
antonyt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

after setting up the system, if I say "turn the ceiling lights to 20%", who else would be changing the lights? But also, post-fix wake word would also be natural if it was recording all the time. "turn on the lights, Google", for instance

Sure, if the system is set up to only respond to very specific commands that humans would not respond to, I guess that could work. I was thinking more about the other way around, where a person might speak to someone else in the room and be overheard and acted upon - "turn on the lights!" could be a command for the computer controlling the room, or the human standing next to the Christmas tree, for example.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#247

Post by paradox460 »

frognumber wrote: post #217
Jarwain wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been using it to generate subtitles for home movies, for an aging family member who is losing their hearing, and it's phenomenal

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#248

Post by squarefoot »

trb wrote: post #5
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…

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.

In many cases the issue isn't the microphone but the horrid amount of reflections that the sound produces before reaching it. A quite good microphone can be built using cheap, yet very clean, capsules like the AOM-5024L-HD-F-R (80 dB s/n) which is ~$3 at Mouser, but room acoustics is a lot more important and also a real pain in the ass when also not a bank account drain if done professionally, although usually carpets, wood furniture, curtains to cover glass and sound panels on concrete walls can be more than enough.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#249

Post by [deleted] »

iteria wrote: post #205
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.)

I don't like these interaces because unless they are button activated or something, they must be always listening and sending sound from where you are to a 3rd party server. No thanks. Of course this could be happening with my phone, but at least it have to be a malicious action to record me 24/7

[deleted]

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#250

Post by horsawlarway »

iteria wrote: post #205
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.)

I don't like these interaces because unless they are button activated or something, they must be always listening and sending sound from where you are to a 3rd party server. No thanks. Of course this could be happening with my phone, but at least it have to be a malicious action to record me 24/7

I mean... That's not true, though.

The main pitch of a tool like this is that I can absolutely verify it's not true.

I'm currently running a slightly different take of this (Esp 32 based devices, with whisper through Willow inference server, with Willow autocorrect, tied into home assistant).

For context, it works completely offline. My modem can literally be unplugged and I can control my smart devices just fine, with my voice. Entirely on my local network, with a couple of cheap devices and a ten year old gaming PC as the server.

My data

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