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

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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".

[–] th3dogcow 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Homebridge is a way to get non-HomeKit devices into HomeKit. It’s what I am using for most of my stuff. It works pretty well in my opinion.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I used homebridge for a long time, but found maintaining it to be a bit of a chore. Home Assistant was easier to maintain and configure, thanks to its web-based interface. And it has a bridge to homekit that achieves basically everything that homebridge did. You may want to investigate it!

[–] th3dogcow 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Thanks. I’ve found that once it is stable I just don’t bother with updates. I have to reboot the system maybe once every six months.

I am aware of and interested in home assistant and may make the switch when I move to a bigger residence. I do like the idea of having most of the logic on the HA side instead of having to script it all on the HomeKit side, which is just clunky and lacks any real backup options.

But homebridge has worked well for my first foray into home automation, and is pretty good for relatively simple setups.