It's less "techy" than HA (no YAML files, no CLI), and UI first.
We have way less integrations for now, but are working hard on it.
Don't hesitate to try it and make us some feedback.
Would you be interesting in integrating with my project Willow[0]?
Willow supports Home Assistant, OpenHAB, and generic REST+MQTT endpoints today. With Home Assistant and OpenHAB we benefit from their specific API support for providing speech to text output and processing through things like the HA Assist Pipelines[1].
From our standpoint we handle wake word, VAD+AEC+BSS, STT, TTS, user feedback, etc. All we really do is send the speech transcript to the Willow command endpoint (like HA) and speak+display the execution result. Other than all of the wild speech stuff and our obsession with speed and accuracy Willow is really quite "dumb" - think of it as a voice terminal.
OpenHAB has something similar but it's significantly more limited.
[0] - https://heywillow.io
[1] - https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/voice/pipelines/
STT is "just" a very heavily optimized (beyond even faster-whisper) Whisper implementation, so all of those languages[0].
For TTS we now use Coqui, which has a wide range of models with various voices, languages, etc. It even supports Meta MMS which has support for 1,100 languages[1].
[0] - https://github.com/openai/whisper#available-models-and-langu...
[1] - https://about.fb.com/news/2023/05/ai-massively-multilingual-...
UI first means you have to build an awful lot of extra cruft to emulate parts of an already solid + flexible toolchain.
EDIT: I should mention that includes text + file based config too...
Definitely not for home use, but I could imagine a place for an open source server to manage a commercial property too. I'm admittedly a total outsider at property management, but I could imagine someone who operates several hotels, office buildings, or maybe even a school district wanting a building automation solution that doesn't lock them into a particular vendor. They'd have enough rooms and hallways with identical equipment that populating it via files, CLI, or an API might make sense.
1 - Most setups are done once
2 - Stability and quality has improved in recent years, and you don't have to fix or mess with it as much
That said, I very much like being able to edit the yaml for automations and the lovelace UI. I like being able to flip back and forth between visual and code from the UI itself. Best of both worlds, especially because there's a lot of automations that are like 60% copied from another one. Being able to use a text editor (that has autocomplete!) to change entity names as opposed to clicking through several layers of UI for each one is awesome.
Last I looked, the industry was trying to roll out some protocols to block open source efforts.
Is there a plan to tackle that?