this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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And this is exact the reason I'm building a Home Assistant instance with local voice processing. Right now it takes a few seconds to process a request and take action on my crappy 1.8ghz laptop with only 4gb of RAM, but it basically does everything I use Alexa for. This announcement is just encouraging me to build a better server with an esp32 satellite.
I'm in the process of this now too. The only need that I can't figure out within home-assistant assist, is unit conversions. Converting measurements when cooking is one of the main things we use the Alexa for these days.
What are you using for microphones?
I'm still working on question one too. It seems like a microphone array is the best option but a lot of them seem over built for the task.
I guess it would be too easy to just have Plug and Play option. 🤷 I am technically inclined but I don't want to spend a ton of time recreating the wheel.
Agreed. I can't seem to find something that I can migrate to which doesn't require a huge reprogramming effort. I would love local control but don't want to spend my Saturdays and freetime struggling to figure out why it's suddenly not working. Alexa is shitty and doesn't have tons of flexible control, but it's 'uptime' is very good, and does well for playing audio for the fam. self note... Get away from Spotify while I'm at it 😭
I don't mind building the stuff when I'm in the mood. When Logitech decided to shut down the Harmony remote line I wrote my own version of a Hub into Home Assistant It was fun and it works better.
But now I'm tech support for it and if it breaks down I have to work on it whether I want to or not. It's put me off wanting to build more stuff from scratch.
This is an instance where I think the folks at nobu casa (paid branch of home assistant development) could dedicate some resources to hardware. Instead of the prebuilt SBC stuff like HA-blue, or yellow or whatever. Create an esp device that just has a reliable microphone, and crank them out. I’d buy one for every room in my house!
I’ve got an esp army in my greenhouse that runs wLED, and one of them has a mic for doing the sound reactive display stuff, but it’s running wLED, not ESPHome… I wonder how easy it would be to just slap a digital mic on some of the other esp things I’ve got floating around?
Honestly, nothing yet. I've only been playing with it for a few weeks. I just use the web interface on my phone to test the voice control. I've been looking at the esp32 devices that people have been building, but a lot of them admit that they can't come anywhere close to the reliability of the microphone array used in the Alexa.
Can it play music from YouTube or Spotify or something? Because that's literally all my kids want an Alexa device for.