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My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

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Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#31

Post by IshKebab »

jcims wrote: post #11
hamdingers wrote: post #10

If you're less concerned about privacy, I use Gemini 2.5 Flash for this and it's exceptionally good and fast as a HA assistant while being much cheaper than the electricity that would be needed to keep a 3090 awake. The thing that kills this for me (and they even mentioned it) is wake word detection. I have both the HA voice preview and FPH Satellite1 devices, plus have experimented with a few other options like a Ra…

I have a feeling beamforming microphone arrays might help here, something like this could improve the audio being processed substantially - https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/uma-8-m... .

Alexa devices have these (or used to at least), but Google Home's never did. So it shouldn't be necessary.

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#32

Post by lordmathis »

voidUpdate wrote: post #4

Do people like talking to voice assistants? I've used one occasionally (mostly for timers when I'm cooking), but most of the time it would be faster for me to just do it myself, and feels much less awkward than talking to empty air, asking it to do things for me. It might be because I just really don't like making more noise than I have to (Yes, I appreciate that some people may be disabled in such a way that it make…

I started designing and building a voice assistant for myself and then realized that the only time I'd find it useful would be during cooking to set timers. But a loud extractor fan would be running making the voice recognition very difficult.

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#33

Post by voidUpdate »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #29
voidUpdate wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not just turn the light on when you go in a room, and turn it off again when you go out? All the rooms in my flat have switches next to the door

The Sun moves around, while I am in a room. It might be high up when I enter a room, but after a while there may be clouds or it may have set. When watching a movie one may dimthe light. Once finished one may need more lights. When going to bed I may want to switch all lights off. When getting up it may need some extra light. A switch on the door is nice. More switches is better. Being able to control from anywhere m…

So I grab my phone, open the homeassistant app, and mess with the settings on my light, or use homeassistant through my browser on my desktop. No yelling at a computer needed

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#34

Post by Skidaddle »

abroadwin wrote: post #19
alex_young wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favorite episodes: I set 2 timers for the same thing somehow. I then tried to cancel one of them. >“Siri, cancel the second timer” “You have 2 timers running, would you like me to cancel one of them?” >“Yes” “Yes is an English rock band from the 70s…” >“Siri, please cancel the timer with 2 minutes and 10 seconds on it” “Would you like me to cancel the timer with 2 minutes and 8 seconds on it?” >“Yes” “Yes i…

My favorite is when I ask Siri to set a timer and get back "there are no timers running."

My other favorite is when I ask Siri to set a timer on my watch and it does a web search.

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#35

Post by j45 »

yanis_t wrote: post #3

I'm still waiting till the promise of voice AI that was showed during the OpenAI demo in 2024 turn real somehow. It's not clear to me, why there has been zero progress since then.

What tech can do vs applying it requires it often to be configured and packaged to be usable in that way.

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#36

Post by phito »

j45 wrote: post #35
yanis_t wrote: post #3

I'm still waiting till the promise of voice AI that was showed during the OpenAI demo in 2024 turn real somehow. It's not clear to me, why there has been zero progress since then.

What tech can do vs applying it requires it often to be configured and packaged to be usable in that way.

It also needs to work at least 99% of the time if not more. Not easy to do this with indeterministic models.

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#37

Post by jcims »

IshKebab wrote: post #31
jcims wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling beamforming microphone arrays might help here, something like this could improve the audio being processed substantially - https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/uma-8-m... .

Alexa devices have these (or used to at least), but Google Home's never did. So it shouldn't be necessary.

Yeah a small (ideally personalized) wakeword model would probably outperform just about any audio wizardry.

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#38

Post by tkems »

One that I have been experimenting with is using analog phones (including rotary ones!) to act as the satellites. I live in an older home and have phone jacks in most of the rooms already so I only had to use a single analog telephone adapter. [0] The downside is I don't have wake word support, but it makes it more private and I don't find myself missing my smart speakers that much. At some point I would like to also support other types of calls on the phones, but for now I need to get an LLM hooked up to it.

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/worlds-most-priv...

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#39

Post by recursive »

phito wrote: post #36
j45 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What tech can do vs applying it requires it often to be configured and packaged to be usable in that way.

It also needs to work at least 99% of the time if not more. Not easy to do this with indeterministic models.

If my lights and heat were 99% reliable, I'd be getting new lights and heat.

Re: My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

#40

Post by jlokier »

lordmathis wrote: post #32
voidUpdate wrote: post #4

Do people like talking to voice assistants? I've used one occasionally (mostly for timers when I'm cooking), but most of the time it would be faster for me to just do it myself, and feels much less awkward than talking to empty air, asking it to do things for me. It might be because I just really don't like making more noise than I have to (Yes, I appreciate that some people may be disabled in such a way that it make…

I started designing and building a voice assistant for myself and then realized that the only time I'd find it useful would be during cooking to set timers. But a loud extractor fan would be running making the voice recognition very difficult.

An extractor fan is the kind of consistent noise that good signal processing and voice recognition ought to be able to strip out, especially if using a dispersed mic array. Even if your voice is much quieter (to your human ears) than the fan. It's a channel separation problem.
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