Depends on which one you have. If you buy their own smart speaker (Voice PE), which is designed to stay entirely local if you have the right hardware and software locally, and even has a hardware switch to temporarily disable the microphone, it’s pretty easy. And of you don’t have all that locally you need a paid subscription to use their cloud a little bit, but they won’t store anything. So still pretty easy.
I want to run my own voice processing service, ideally. Something that runs off of my home assistant server, would be cool if it made use of a Coral AI or similar.
You can. There are simple options, that only recognise predefined sentences, that even work on a Raspberry Pi, and at the other end of the spectrum you can host an LLM locally and chat with that if you have the right hardware (Coral isn’t powerful enough for that, you want a GPU with lots of VRAM). Obviously setting this up is more complicated, but there are a lot of options to do it your way.
IIRC it’s supposed to be getting better rapidly, as it’s an active focus of development for Home Assistant.
That said, I thought this seemed like a good guide on how to set it up as of 8 months ago. (I’m not necessarily a fan of that guy’s bombastic over-enthusiasm, but the info seems good.)
Buy this. You can use your own voice processing on another machine on your network. You could even hook it up to your Ollama. I have it and it’s completely replaced Google Home for voice control.
XD, I totally did this to make a smart alarm clock a couple years ago. That said it is completely stable, don’t think it has ever crashed or locked up on me, unlike the echo show it replaced that did so frequently (not to mention it occasionally updating in the middle of the night and waking me up at full brightness)
Is it easy to set up a smart speaker with Home Assistant? Last I heard, it was kind of a PITA.
Depends on which one you have. If you buy their own smart speaker (Voice PE), which is designed to stay entirely local if you have the right hardware and software locally, and even has a hardware switch to temporarily disable the microphone, it’s pretty easy. And of you don’t have all that locally you need a paid subscription to use their cloud a little bit, but they won’t store anything. So still pretty easy.
I want to run my own voice processing service, ideally. Something that runs off of my home assistant server, would be cool if it made use of a Coral AI or similar.
You can. There are simple options, that only recognise predefined sentences, that even work on a Raspberry Pi, and at the other end of the spectrum you can host an LLM locally and chat with that if you have the right hardware (Coral isn’t powerful enough for that, you want a GPU with lots of VRAM). Obviously setting this up is more complicated, but there are a lot of options to do it your way.
IIRC it’s supposed to be getting better rapidly, as it’s an active focus of development for Home Assistant.
That said, I thought this seemed like a good guide on how to set it up as of 8 months ago. (I’m not necessarily a fan of that guy’s bombastic over-enthusiasm, but the info seems good.)
Buy this. You can use your own voice processing on another machine on your network. You could even hook it up to your Ollama. I have it and it’s completely replaced Google Home for voice control.
I’m curious about this as well. I think all the components are available, but nobody’s clicked them together yet.
My understanding is the software is the problem, I don’t understand why though.
Because software is hard to write and not many people want to spend their free time writing it???
Instead of complaining, Go be the change you want. It’s all open source…
Probably 200$ of raspberry pi gear plus a few weekends messing around should net you something awesome that only catastrophically fails sometimes.
XD, I totally did this to make a smart alarm clock a couple years ago. That said it is completely stable, don’t think it has ever crashed or locked up on me, unlike the echo show it replaced that did so frequently (not to mention it occasionally updating in the middle of the night and waking me up at full brightness)