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

community.home-assistant.io

1–10 of 153 posts

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

#2
Their first version is most likely already 10x better than Siri.

> Understands when it is in a particular area and does not ask “which light?” when there is only one light in the area, but does correctly ask when there are multiple of the device type in the given area.

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

#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 makes sense to use voice assistants, eg motor problems)

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

#5

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 use it frequently for reminders and calendar events when not at a computer, as voice is faster than the mobile interface (with so many screens) for setting something up

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

#8

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 love it for lists- like my hands are full making something in the kitchen and I can just tell it to add things to my grocery list as soon as I notice I'm out of something.

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

#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 Raspberry Pi with a conference mic.

Somehow nothing is even 50% good as my Echo devices at picking up the wake word. The assistant itself is far better, but that doesn't matter if it takes 2-3 tries to get it to listen to you. If someone solves this problem with open hardware I'll be immediately buying several.

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