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Comment by Normal_gaussian | Hacker News Reader

No, there isn't a plug and play one yet, but I've have great success with Home Assistant and the Home Assistant Voice Preview edition and its goal is pretty much to get rid of Alexa.

I'd imagine you'd have a bunch of cheap ones in the house that are all WiFi + Mic + Speakers, streaming back to your actual voice processing box (which would cost a wee bit more, but also have local access to all the data it needs).

You can see quite quickly that this becomes just another program running on a host, so if you use a slightly beefier machine and chuck a WiFi card in as well you've got your WiFi extenders.

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> but I've have great success with Home Assistant and the Home Assistant Voice Preview edition

As compared to Alexa? I bought their preview hardware (and had a home-rolled ESP32 version before that even) and things are getting closer, I can see the future where this works but we aren't there today IMHO. HA Voice (the current hardware) does not do well enough in the mic or speaker [0] department when compared to the Echos. My Echo can hear me over just about anything and I can hear it back, the HA Voice hardware is too quiet and the mic does not pick my up from the same distances or noise pollution levels as the Echo.

I _love_ my HA setup and run everything through it. I'd like nothing more than to trash all my Echos, I cam close to ordering multiple of the preview devices but convinced myself to get just 1 to test (glad I did).

Bottom line: I think HA Voice is the future (for me) but it's not ready yet, it doesn't compare to the Echos. I wish so much that my Sonos speakers could integrate with HA Voice since I already have those everywhere and I know they sound good.

[0] I use Sonos for all my music/audio listening in my house so I only care about the speaker for hearing it talk back to me, I don't need high-end audiophile speakers.

I had the same experience, eBay suggests that I'll have a Jabra speakerphone in my mailbox tomorrow to try moving everything to a better audio setup. The software seems good but the audio performance is miserable on the preview device, you essentially have to be talking directly at the microphone from not more than a few feet away for anything to recognize.

Sadly, the Jabra (or any USB) audio device means I'll need to shift over to an rPi which comes with it's own lifecycle challenges.

I've not had any issues with the audio picking up, but its in the living room rather than the kitchen. I have Alexa's in most rooms. I don't play music through it, which I do from the Alexa. Tbh I think the mic and the speakers will be fine when the rest of the 'product' is sorted.

I failed to mention I have Claude connected to it rather than their default assistant. To us, this just beats Alexa hands down. I have the default assistant another wake word and mistral on the last, they're about as good as Alexa but I rarely use them.

Interesting, well I'm glad it's working well for you all. I tested with local, HA Cloud, and ChatGPT/Claude and that wasn't the sticking point, it was getting the hardware to hear me or for me to hear it.

I will say, while it was too slow (today) with the my local inference hardware (CPU, older computer and a little on my newer MBP) it was magically to talk to and hear back from HA all locally. I look forward to a future where I can do that at the same speed/quality as the cloud models. Yes, I know cloud models will continue to get better but turning on/off my fans/lights/etc doesn't need to best model available, just needs to be reliable and fast, I'm even fine with it "shelling out" to the cloud if I ask it for something outside of the basics though I doubt I'll care to do that.

> Yes, I know cloud models will continue to get better but turning on/off my fans/lights/etc doesn't need to best model available, just needs to be reliable and fast, I'm even fine with it "shelling out" to the cloud if I ask it for something outside of the basics though I doubt I'll care to do that.

This is exactly how I feel. Its also why I like the multiple wake words - one for remote and one for local.

One of the amazing things I've found with the LLM powered voice assistants is being able to 'recover' from mistakes - e.g. when cooking and forgetting to set the next timer, I can recover by asking about another event like when the last timer ended or when I turned off the bedroom light. Its annoying you can't do that with Alexa. This 'complexity' doesn't need a huge or SOTA model to resolve! I also enjoy being able to ask for a song by half title and half description - my wife was trying to play Ghost by Au/Ra, which we just can't get the Alexa to do, and I can't reasonably get my local LLMs to fail at.

After your comment earlier I took the preview edition into the kitchen, where it did perform a lot worse with the multiple bits of white noise and odd room shape.

And if it is plugged in to the wall, I'd be tempted to add a touch screen display and a camera just in case.

But really my use case is as simple as

1. Wake word, what time is it in ____

2. Wake word, how is the weather in ____

3. Wake word, will it rain/snow/?? in _____ today / tomorrow / ??

4. Wake word, what is ______

5. Wake word, when is the next new moon / full moon?

6. Wake word, when is sunrise / sunset?

And something similar like that

So you need a clock maybe? Plus something like wttr.in

Problem is it should be accessible by voice for like a ninety year old person.

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