Can you manage your house with a local, no-cloud voice assistant? Mostly, yes.

The problem I have always had with voice control is that it just doesn't really seem to fit into my home automation. I don't want to give Home Assistant a verbal command to turn on the lights. I want it to detect that I've entered the room and set the lights to the appropriate scene automatically; I haven't touched a light switch in weeks. For selecting an album or movie to play, it's easier to use a menu on a screen than to try to explain it verbally.

Don't get me wrong. I'm hugely in favor of anything that runs locally instead of using the "cloud." I think that the majority of people running a home automation server want to tinker with it and streamline it to do things on its own. I want it to "read my mind." The people who just want a basic solution probably aren't going to set up HA.

Maybe I'm missing a use case for voice control?

I've been doing home automation for awhile now. Voice assistant is never anything I would consider. What problem does it solve that a button doesn't do with less hassle?

Also, note automation. The whole point is for the house to do its thing with minimal interaction based on triggers and states. Everyone leaves? Turn off the lights, lock the doors, turn down the heat. TV comes on after dusk? Dim the living room lights if they are on. Going down the basement stairs? Turn on the lights. Cat just used the litter box? Turn on the hepa filter for a bit.

Using Voice Assist pipeline via the HASS cloud subscription works a heck of a lot better than locally. Locally it takes about 15 seconds to respond, via the Nabu Casa server it's about 1 second. I've considered dedicating a box to the containers it's instantiating to do this to get faster response.

If only there was an alternative to voice-assisted house management.

I don’t think Sonos gets enough credit for their local voice control capability. It can’t be integrated into home assistant to do anything beyond controlling the Sonos speakers, but I have been ABSOLUTELY blown away by how responsive the voice commands have been. Literally a 100% success rate after using it for a couple months now. It correctly interprets if you want to start/stop playing, can find music by the artist I want from Apple Music (not sure about other streaming services), and will correctly adjust playing status for a specific speaker if you say to adjust music on that speaker only - even if you command it from another room.

The best part - no bullshit worst responses about “by the way….” Like on Alexa. At most, you get a short response like “good choice” or “ok”.

Sonos isn’t cheap, but I would 100% buy them again every time because it just works.

So what is Home Assistant using for this?

If I were to build it myself I'd probably over complicate it by using multiple llm agents on a local server. Probably use whisper to do the speech to text and then Mistral fine tuned on the Rosetta code dataset to send the API calls to HA. However that wouldnt keep it from always listening to me and trying to interpret what I say into a command for HA. Is that just a prompting issue for whisper or would I need another agent to turn on whisper?

I could maybe get this to run without specialized hardware like a GPU but it would be better to have something for the llms to be a bit more responsive.

Anyone else see a happy little house living in the mouth of an iDomokun?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Right now, with some off-the-shelf gear and the patience to flash and fiddle, you can ask “Nabu” or “Jarvis” or any name you want to turn off some lights, set the thermostat, or run automations.

It’s not entirely fair to compare locally run, privacy-minded voice control to the “assistants” offered by globe-spanning tech companies with secondary motives.

While outgrowers are happy to leave behind the inconsistent behavior, privacy concerns, or limitations of their old systems, they can miss being able to just shout from anywhere in a room and have a device figure out their intent.

Here’s a look at what you can do today with your human voice and Home Assistant, what remains to be fixed and made easier, and how it got here.

“As it stands today, we’re not ready yet to tell people that our voice assistant is a replacement for Google/Amazon,” Schoutsen wrote.

All that said, it’s impressive how far Home Assistant has come since late 2022, when it made its pronouncement, despite not really having a clear path toward its end goal.

The original article contains 469 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I'm pretty new to all this, I just got a smart light and hub, etc. With the idea of using voice commands on my iphone/ipad.

But I was really disappointed to find out that I can't voice activate the command "living room light on", because as soon as Siri hears this, it responds "oh you havent setup a homekit device".

I have this setup and using the esp my stack device mentioned in the article. The biggest problem with it is esphome and home assistant expect home assistant to be running in a dedicated device for this to work. The integration uses a random UDP port to communicate with the M5 stack device. I had to resort to patching the Integration to use a couple specific ports to work properly.

Unfortunately the fix didn't last long and a update to home assistant updated the integration and now the text to search response fails for esphome devices. My next plan is to try to downgrade esphome integration to the old one that was patched / working and call it a day.

Can you manage your house without a voice assistant

I understand that this is useful for older people or the differently abled, and this solution is better than most, but according to me, please get up and turn the switch off, it’s not like we are living in humongous houses anyway, I don’t want anymore mics and camera with me than I already have