homeassistant

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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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How is it going with “Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition”? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 days ago by AA5B@lemmy.world to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world

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For those of us still impatiently waiting, what is your experience so far with “Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition”?

—- I ordered just 2 hours in but the vendor I used sold out in 21 minutes. I just found out I also missed the restock, so hopefully some time next month.

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[–] cevn@lemmy.world 17 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I have it. If i say Basement lights off, it takes 15 seconds and 70% of the time says Sorry I couldn’t understand. My kid thinks it is very funny tho.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Bummer. That’s one of my primary uses for Alexa, that I’d like to fix.

if I ask Alexa, it reacts right away, faster than walking over to the switch, especially when I specify a dimmer setting
if I ask Alexa on my thermostat, it’s damn slow to respond and sometimes misses, but the trick is leaving enough time after calling her name

[–] cevn@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think hosting it somewhere other than the HA device may help with speed at least. I will have to try that to hopefully juice it up. No idea whether accuracy will improve.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

That will an important metric to determine. I know the doc said raspberry pi or similar are too slow but what local control is sufficient. Even among Pi’s there’s a large range of capability- I wonder how a Pi5 does or if it’s demanding of memory or something

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's my experience with all voice assistants. I hate them as a UX in general.

[–] cevn@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah.. if it works it can be useful but sadly this is not quite there for whatever reason, underpowered HA hardware or insufficient training maybe. Like if the hardware sucks it should just take a while and then work but the fact that it doesn’t makes it very useless, and no I dont want to connect to their cloud service thats the whole point of HA is to stay local..

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I just haven't seen any implementation that works for me. Like, I use Google assistant sometimes and it really can't do anything reliably besides setting a timer. I just don't think it's a good way to interact with systems to begin with.

Maybe other people have better luck with it, and it's good that the HA Devs are building a free version of it, but it's just not for me.

[–] cevn@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I use Siri for this kinda thing and it is 100% accurate for setting lights and timers. Sometimes I just want to talk instead of pressing phone buttons or switches, it can save me from getting out of bed. Definitely not a necessity though.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

I also have excellent results with Siri. While I have it require a click before listening, I’m always wearing my watch so it’s still pretty convenient.

But I have to admit the always listening part is kind of nice. It started off innocently enough : hey my thermostat can do Alexa. Then we discovered the intercom feature and ended up with one in every room