If you’re using the Home Assistant voice assistant mechanism (not Alexa/Google/etc.) how’s it working for you?
Given there’s a number of knobs that you can use, what do you use and what works well?
- Wake word model. There’s the default models and custom
- Conservation agent and model
- Speech to text models (e.g. speech-to-phrase or whisper)
- Text to speech models
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HA Voice Preview is cool but it’s a toy compared to Alexa. It’s not loud enough and doesn’t pick out the wake work well enough. Incredibly cool pipeline and ability to tweak it, once the hardware improves I’d love to replace all my Echo’s.
There seem to be some 3rd party music capable devices in the works but nothing ready made in production.
I am waiting for a better overall speaker and I need a new server that can at least run a small lllm to run the assistant as intents are too ridged
The biggest challenge, in my experience, is finding hardware that heats you well, and you can hear well.
On my PCs USB mic when I’m sitting directly on front of it, everything works quite well. Once I start stepping away, things start to get funky.
It’s probably a mono directional mic, or just narrow focus. Omni directional mics I only know about in the musical sense, and they aren’t cheap. But I’m sure there are inexpensive versions
I’d like a PCB designed as a drop-in replacement for labotomized Echo or Nest devices so we can reuse their existing hardware and recycle millions of older units.
I only ever set timers and checked the weather when I had a Google home mini, Voice preview is able to do that pretty well.
I have an S3-BOX-3 and it works, sort of. But without a local LLM and better local speech to text it’s not super useful.
Here are the specs on the HA voice Preview: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
And a breakdown of one of the lowest-end Alexa devices: https://www.briandorey.com/post/echo-dot-5th-gen-smart-speaker-teardown
The HA device runs on an ESP32-S3 with two microphones. A Seedstudio variant uses a Raspberry Pi CM4, also with two mics: https://iotbyhvm.ooo/home-assistant-voice-kit-by-seeed-studio-a-comprehensive-guide/
The Echo dot runs on a custom AZ2 processor with a built-in neural edge processor and three microphones. Echoes used to have as many as seven mics, but advanced Digital Signal Processing techniques let them get away with fewer input signals (and lower BOM cost).
The difference is with three or more mics you can do what’s called ‘beam-forming’ (https://dspconcepts.com/sites/default/files/voice_ui_part2.pdf) to isolate outside noise. This gets you cleaner wake-word recognition and faster response. Also, having an on-device neural processor chip means you can offload a lot of the filter processing.
The upshot is, until HA switches to a more custom audio-processing system, it’ll always lag behind a cheap $30 Echo or Google device. The HA unit is good for dev experimentation, but for day-to-day use folks might want to consider something from the ReSpeaker line: https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2024/10/16/smart-home-assistant-speakers/
I use the HA Voice Preview in two different rooms and got rid of my Alexa Dots. I’ve been trying both speech-to-phrase and whisper with medium.en running on the GPU for STT, tried llama3.2 and granite4 for the LLM with local command handling
I’ve been trying to get it working better, but it’s been a struggle. The wake word responds to me, but not my girlfriend’s voice. I try setting timers, and it says done, but never triggers the timer.
I’d love to improve operating performance of my assistant, but want to know what options work well for others. I’ve been experimenting with an intermediary STT proxy to send it to both whisper and speech-to-phrase to see which one has more confidence.
Mine stopped working and I can’t figure out how to fix it. I switched back and forth between cloud and local models and at some point it just died.
I built a docker wyoming version of pocket-tts a while ago because I like the voices and timbre of pocket-tts better than Piper. I’ve subbed it in for Piper.
Also been using the OVH Linux-voice-assistant which I dockerized for voice hardware on my desktop.
It’s not 🙁. Height of laziness: I ran out of usb-c cables and had to use that one for something else.
It’s not like I can get them dirt cheap overnight delivery ……
I have speech to text with whisper working on my phone. HA is set to the default assistant on my phone so I can control lights, timers and scenes from 1 action on my phone or watch. Works well once I set friendly names for each light, room, device and scene.