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Comment by _spduchamp | Hacker News Reader

How about a button?

I'd prefer to physically press a button on an intercom box than having something churning away constantly processing sound.

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If I have to go to a thing and push a button, I'd rather the button do the thing I wanted in the first place. Voice assistants are for when my hands are full or I don't want to get up. (I wrote more about my home automation philosophy in another comment[1]).

Also I have all my voice assistant devices mounted to the ceiling

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47399909

What if you have two things? You'd then need two buttons.

The push button is a perfectly viable option, it just needs to be in a form factor that's works. Could be as simple as a tiny low-energy Bluetooth board with a coin battery that will last several months.

Luckily I carry around a device with infinite reconfigurable buttons!

Yeah, a touch-sensitive com-badge mounted on your chest would work.

Actually, I would think a small coin-sized button & transmitter that did nothing but emit a signal that your assistant (or phone) interprets as 'start listening' would be pretty useful. In your pocket, on a watch band, etc.

The pebble index seems like the optimal form for this.

https://repebble.com/index

Could be pressed even if your hands were busy.

If you want to relax some constraints, I made something similar for $10: https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/

Did you have any luck with the power issues on the new board?

The new board hasn't come yet, but a friend gave me a great idea, to power the mic from a GPIO, which powers it off completely when the ESP is off.

Hopefully the new boards will be here soon, but another issue is that I don't really have anything that can measure microamp consumption, so any testing takes days of waiting for the battery to run down :(

I do think these clones are the issue, though. They had a LED I couldn't turn off, so they'd literally shine forever. They don't seem engineered for low quiescent current, so fingers crossed with the new ones.

Makes a lot of sense :) thanks for the update.

I'll try to remember to creepy stalk you for updates as the device sounds great!

You can sign up to my mailing list to get emails if you want! It's at the end of each post.

Thank you for the blog/updates.

Since you're deep into this space, Do you use wall mount dashboards? There seems to be two camps now: Dashboards everywhere or none at all.

Is it worth removing the led from the board? Wont help with any other decisions by the designer that draw excess current, but maybe that's the only or largest one?

I did remove it :( It's still pretty bad. I ordered some Xiaos that do explicitly say 14 uA sleep current, but they seem to have gotten lost in the mail!

Most of what I (and in my experience many people) want a voice assistant for, is setting+ending timers... which for me happens mostly in the kitchen, while I'm simultaneously holding a hot pan or hand-tossing a salad or paper-towelling off some raw chicken. In none of those cases would I want a ring anywhere near my hands, let alone a smart ring. (And nor, in half of those cases, is it convenient/hygenic to use my oven timer.)

That being said, we could solve for fully 50% of in-home voice-assistant use-cases just by developing an extremely domain-specific voice assistant that has an extremely small (ideally burned-into-a-DSP) voice model that only knows how to recognize commands to manage kitchen timers. If such a device existed, and was cheap enough that you could assume anyone who wanted this functionality would just buy one, then this would make truly hands-free activation of a "real" voice-assistant much less necessary, as there'd be far fewer user-stories that would really "need" that. The rest of those user-stories really mostly could work with some kind of ring / belt buckle / shirt comm badge / etc.

Like a light switch?

Or do you mean a button that activates chunked recording, passes it to a speech-to-text model, forwards to an LLM to infer intent, which triggers HA to issue a command, over a wireless network, to the computer with the light attached, to tell the light to turn on.

Rules out a bunch of cases where your hands are busy handling ingredients in the kitchen, etc

Put it at foot level and kick it.

Time for a real life Star Trek comm badge

We thought so too ;) https://www.linkedin.com/posts/y-combinator_button-computer-...

For real, if I had a fully self-hosted and private system, I'd love a real life Star Trek comm badge. Being able to say, "where is Jeff?" and have it tell me alone would be quite an awesome feature

I'm in if I can embed it into my forearm

In the mid 2000s I had a setup where some children's walkie talkie "spy watches" could be used to issue commands to a completely DIY, relay based smart home system.

I'm looking forward to whenever my Pebble ships so I can recreate that experience with this: https://github.com/skylord123/pebble-home-assistant-ws

apple watch gets you close.

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