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Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

I invested in Mycroft and it flopped. Here’s hoping some others can go where they couldn’t.

I think Mycroft was unfortunately just ahead of its time. STT was just becoming good enough but NLU wasn’t quite there yet. Add in you’re up against Apple Google and Amazon who were able to add integrations like music and subsidize the crap out of their products.

I just think this time around is different. Open Whisper gives them amazing STT and LLMs can far more easily be adapted for the NLU portion. The hardware is also dirt cheap which makes it better suited to a narrow use case.

I guess the difference here is that HA has a huge community already. I believe the estimate was around 250k installations running actively. I suspect a huge chunk of the HA users venn diagram slice fits within the voice users slice.

Our estimates are more than a million active instances https://analytics.home-assistant.io/

More than a million? It says on the page: "424,548 Active Home Assistant Installations"

Am I missing something? Is it that these are just those you know are sharing details, and you can scale that up by a known percentage? :)

> Analytics in Home Assistant are opt-in and do not reflect the entire Home Assistant userbase. We estimate that a third of all Home Assistant users opt in.

I'm a big fan of home assistant, and use it to control a LOT of my home, have done for years, have tonnes of hardware dedicated to and for it, and I've also ordered some of these Voice devices.

I'm also opted OUT of the analytics.

Wow- good on you guys, and kudos for such an amazing project!!

IIRC one of the main devs behind this device came from Mycroft.

OP's username checks out.

Yep, Mike Hansen was on the live stream launching the new device. He also notably created Rhasspy [1], which is open-source voice assistant software for Raspberry Pi (when connected to a microphone and speaker).

[1] https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

I believe Mycroft was killed in part due to a patent troll:

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/02/13/linux_ai_assistan...

Hopefully the troll is no longer around

I think another part is that there is a failure mechanism on their boards that was recently identified: https://community.openconversational.ai/t/sj-201-sj201-failu...

The short version, from the post, is that there are 4 capacitors that are only rated for 6.3v, but the power supply is 12v. Eventually one of these capacitors will fail, causing the board to stop working entirely.

It would be hard for a company to stay in business when they are fighting a patent troll lawsuit and having to handle returns on every device they sold through kickstarter.

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