How is it going with “Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition”?
For those of us still impatiently waiting, what is your experience so far with “Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition”?
—- I ordered just 2 hours in but the vendor I used sold out in 21 minutes. I just found out I also missed the restock, so hopefully some time next month.
I am using a few of self-built assistants using https://github.com/formatBCE/Koala-Satellite/tree/main - which was heavily inspired and uses a lot of very similar hardware to HA Voice. I have to say my speakers turned out pretty great.
This speakers are fire! That's awesome
Thanks, I like them too! I’m amazed how much can one do with a 3d printer and ac solder iron:)
Looks great!
Does this speaker require nabu casa cloud stuff?
The media player platform is "nabu" and a ton of things based on that. If nabu isn't a requirement then maybe I will rebase by own spin on them (using an AV receiver with RCA cables instead of built in speakers) and see if it improves it is some way!
I have it. If i say Basement lights off, it takes 15 seconds and 70% of the time says Sorry I couldn’t understand. My kid thinks it is very funny tho.
It's my experience with all voice assistants. I hate them as a UX in general.
Yeah.. if it works it can be useful but sadly this is not quite there for whatever reason, underpowered HA hardware or insufficient training maybe. Like if the hardware sucks it should just take a while and then work but the fact that it doesn’t makes it very useless, and no I dont want to connect to their cloud service thats the whole point of HA is to stay local..
Bummer. That’s one of my primary uses for Alexa, that I’d like to fix.
Also sitting idly by wanting more people to talk about it! All I want it for is two features:
-converting units of measure hands-free in the kitchen(27 teaspoons to fl oz, as an example) -check the weather for the day on my way out the door.
I don't want my comment to come off negative towards the product because my experience has less to do with the speaker itself in more to do with my expectations but i'm less than impressed with it at the moment.
I was watching the live stream and bought one the moment they said sales were live, took about a week to get in. Having never used assist within home assistant before i thought at the very least i could say "turn off the kitchen" and the software would know there was a room called kitchen and turn anything off in it. Nope.
I will eventually get around to setting up my own local llm once i get the right hardware but i don't understand all these people "glad to drop alexa and google" just to feed their data into a public online llm. Feels worse to me in some ways.
Currently it lives in my bedroom and the speaker is a bit to tin/treb to work for our sound machine but a $10 aux speaker did well enough with that. I had to manually plug phrases i want it to do into an automation but once i did that everything worked fine. At the end of the day, though, if i'm using an additional speaker i don't understand why i should pay $60 for this when i could get the components and diy one for less than $35.
In the end, I guess I trust Nabu Casa infinitely more than Google/Amazon. I'll do without if it means having their wiretaps in my house. At least HA is trying to give us local voice assist. That was never going to happen with the others.
You misunderstand my statement. The way i see people making this device better is by either having thousands of dollars of gpu hardware and running their own robust local model or sending their data off to something like chat gpt. The first i have no issue with, if only i had the budget for, the second feels worse to me than alexa. I know amazon knows a lot about me, i don't need to start feeding all my data to an additional cloud entity.
I love everything Nabu Casa is doing and even though i don't use any of the perks it offers i still pay for their monthly service to continue supporting them.
Mine has arrived but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.
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It's great! I ran Mycroft for years and this is such a better experience overall. I really love the ability to create custom sentences to trigger whatever. There are features I'm still hoping for like some kind of reminder things so I can finally drop google assistant for good. This is a great product for enthusiasts and signals even better products in the future as the ecosystem matures. It's a good time to be interested in voice assistants.
Tagging in on this too, I'm wondering what speaker people are combining this with for music streaming. I've heard on the early reviews that the speaker is fine for assisting, but not great for music
I really want to see if someone comes out with a dock which has a better speaker. Something you can just pop the voice preview hardware on top of would be nice
Same or even if it makes sense (which honestly I think it absolutely does) at least have an option maybe after the preview edition to have one with a better speaker built in for more cost or something. Keep one as is if you only need the voice assistant, but one one be $20-40 more or something if you plan on using it for music too
I ordered mine the day they were announced, right before Christmas at a period that I was enjoying tinkering with, and optimising my HA setup. I was looking forward to doing the same with this over the break.
Unfortunately they didn't actually ship it until after Christmas and by the time it arrived I was in full slob mode with little desire to sit at a desk. Even now I'm still trying to get myself back into a working mindset.
All of which is to say I added it to HA and have done nothing with it since.
It’s there and configured. Ready to go. You can do it
You're not wrong but the local whisper(?) engine is really slow running on my NAS. I have an N100 box that runs Plex but I haven't found much to suggest it would be any quicker running from there due to a lack of OpenVino support. Standard Whisper can be compiled to use it but it's potentially no quicker than faster-whisper without it.
And that's where I'm up to really. Every time I think about getting some different versions installed and doing benchmarks my brain goes back to Christmas slob mode and fogs over.