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The era of open voice assistants

home-assistant.io

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Re: The era of open voice assistants

#281

Post by IgorPartola »

wlonkly wrote: post #277
IgorPartola wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A group buy is when you want to buy a bunch of existing product at wholesaler prices. Kickstarter is about funding new project that don’t exist yet. Like if the wholesaler refuses to sell you 1000 video cards, just give the money back. If you spend the Kickstarter money and can’t land a product there isn’t much you can do for refunds.

It's both, I think, depending on the conventions around the thing being group-bought. What you describe is unquestionably a group buy, but in, for example, the mechanical keyboards community, a "group buy" is paying the designer of a thing (keyboard, keycap set, etc.) for the expense of third-party production up front. It's really more of a preorder that requires a certain volume to proceed. But regardless, they're c…

Hah I was recently looking at that subreddit and yeah that’s why I don’t like the idea of that kind of group buy. It’s a gamble on everything working out and everyone doing the right things. I also would argue that requesting a known designer/manufacturer to make N of a specific item is different than asking an unknown designer to do so for the first time. Terminology aside, this is my original point: that is a risky way of doing things and communicates to the consumer that the product is unlikely to just get made and be available.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#282

Post by gerdesj »

paradox460 wrote: post #241
gerdesj wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have four Home Assistants pinned in the browser on my laptop. I look after several more.

Thanks for the heads up about Digital Alchemy, now I have to go and evaluate it 8)

I already have upgrades to my 3D printer sat waiting, and a massive stack of software to go through for work and home.

I've just finished replacing all the door handles in my home (long story) and the flush button on the down stair bog. It turns out that most of my home lighting has a spare conductor available or I can use a dimmer instead, so smart lighting is indicated at the switch. One lot done, more to do.

All of my smart IoT stuff must be locally administrated and have a manual option if the network is unavailable, if possible and work as well as a non smart effort with regards power. So my doorbell is a Reolink job on the THINGS VLAN with no access to the internet. It is PoE powered and the switch is powered by a UPS. You get the idea.

I run my home IoT smart stuff with the same rigor as I do at work. I'm an IT consultant these days but I did study Civ Eng at college.

HA allows for plenty of solid engineering for engineers. You can do it all in the GUI with decent integrations as a "newbie" with confidence that you won't go too far wrong. You've also got a really solid Zwave stack aside a well integrated MQTT stack - how much more do you want?

Theres also a Zigbee stack too, which is ideal for cheap stuff. My Lidl smart switches work really well at quite a long range.

I could go on at length ... 8)

How much more engineer do you need?

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#283

Post by wlonkly »

IgorPartola wrote: post #281
wlonkly wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's both, I think, depending on the conventions around the thing being group-bought. What you describe is unquestionably a group buy, but in, for example, the mechanical keyboards community, a "group buy" is paying the designer of a thing (keyboard, keycap set, etc.) for the expense of third-party production up front. It's really more of a preorder that requires a certain volume to proceed. But regardless, they're c…

Hah I was recently looking at that subreddit and yeah that’s why I don’t like the idea of that kind of group buy. It’s a gamble on everything working out and everyone doing the right things. I also would argue that requesting a known designer/manufacturer to make N of a specific item is different than asking an unknown designer to do so for the first time. Terminology aside, this is my original point: that is a risky…

Absolutely. If one was uncharitable, one might suggest the reason that some of those group-buy-powered companies run their own storefront instead of Kickstarter is so that their customers associate them with "buying" and not with "funding".

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#284

Post by danparsonson »

lxe wrote: post #279
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!

Wake words are different from "listen to everyhing until name is called". A wake work is needed for both privacy and technical reasons -- you can't just have alexa beaming everything it hears to amazon. So instead it uses a local lightweight "dumb" system to listen to specific words only. That's exactly why there's massive latencies between command recognition, processing, and execution. Imagine if it had sub-ms resp…

Sure OK, maybe it's a beneficial side effect then. However you look at it, trying to get the computer to decide when you are addressing it, without using a name of some sort, could be a very challenging problem to solve, one that even humans struggle with. Surely you've been in a situation where you say something to a room and multiple people think you're talking to them? To borrow an example from elsewhere in the thread, if you say "turn on the lights", are you talking to the computer controlling the room lights, or the human standing next to the Christmas tree?

> Imagine if it had sub-ms response to "assistant, add uuh eggs and milk to the shopping list... actually no just eggs sorry"

Could you elaborate on that? What if that were true?

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#285

Post by mystified5016 »

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

In this scenario, you have intentionally and willfully done something private in public.

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#286

Post by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe »

amluto wrote: post #275

One thing that makes me nervous: Home Assistant has an extremely weak security model. There is recent support for admin users, and that’s about it. I’m sort of okay with the users on an installation having effectively unrestricted access to all entities and actions. I’m much less okay with an LLM having this sort of access. An actually good product in this space IMO needs to be able to define specific sets of actions…

You can already choose which entity to expose to the LLMs

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#287

Post by bdavbdav »

cachvico wrote: post #144
bdavbdav wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GH is basically abandonware at this stage it seems. They just seem to break random things, and there haven’t been any major updates / features for ages (and Gemini is still a way off for most).

Google Home's Nest integration is recent and top-notch though. Hopefully in a year they'll have rolled out the Gemini integration and things will be back on track.

I’d not go as far as too notch. We’ve reverted as family members don’t get notifications (like from the doorbell)

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#288

Post by bdavbdav »

balloob wrote: post #102
bdavbdav wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the difference here is that HA has a huge community already. I believe the estimate was around 250k installations running actively. I suspect a huge chunk of the HA users venn diagram slice fits within the voice users slice.

Our estimates are more than a million active instances https://analytics.home-assistant.io/

Wow- good on you guys, and kudos for such an amazing project!!

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#289

Post by entropicdrifter »

jorvi wrote: post #262
entropicdrifter wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You wouldn’t ask your partner deeply private questions in front of your mom either. Not sure how you think it’s a dig against voice assistant privacy.

I'm just translating why that person (nine_k) feels that any voice interface is non-private. It's not how I feel

Re: The era of open voice assistants

#290

Post by entropicdrifter »

xandrius wrote: post #242
entropicdrifter wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I personally agree with your stance, but was simply interpreting what nine_k expressed so everyone else could understand their perspective.
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