Home Assistant launches its first voice assistant hardware device
December 20, 2024

Home Assistant launches its first voice assistant hardware device

There’s a new voice assistant in town that works locally in your home, eliminating the need to call home and deal with corporate overload. This week, the popular smart home platform Home Assistant Officially launched Its first voice assistant hardware—— Home Assistant Voice Preview.

Specifically built for open source smart home platforms, Voice PE costs $59 And brings a locally controlled, privacy-focused voice assistant to Home Assistant in a plug-and-play manner. Once connected to home assistantyou can use your voice Control any connected deviceusing commands such as “Turn on living room lights”, “Lock all doors”, “Create 5-minute timer”, and and more.

While home assistant users are already able to control their smart homes using voice Home assistant assistance exist Third-party hardware has poor capabilities Or connect to third-party services through the cloud, such as Amazon Alexa and google assistantthe first dedicated home assistant voice hardware product.

Voice PE Yes Year of the Home Assistant Voiceis an effort by Nabu Casa, the organization behind Home Assistant, to allow users to control their homes locally and privately in their own language. currently it Supports more than 50 languageswhile Alexa has 8 and Google Assistant has 20.

Home Assistant Voice Preview.
Picture: Nabu Kasa

The Voice PE is a small white box, about the size of the palm of your hand, with dual microphones and an audio processor. Built-in speakers let you hear your assistant’s voice, but you can also connect speakers to it via the 3.5mm headphone jack for higher-quality media playback.

After unboxing, you can use the wake words “Okay Nabu”, “Hey Jarvis” or “Hey Mycroft” to talk to Assist.

A colored LED ring on top of Voice PE indicates when the assistant is listening. It’s centered around a rotary dial and a physical button for settings and talking to the voice assistant without using a wake word. The button can also be customized to do whatever you want (since this is a home assistant). A physical mute switch is located on the side, and the unit is powered by USB-C (charger and cable not included). There’s also a Grove port where you can add sensors and other accessories.

Speaking of wake words, you can directly use the wake words “Okay Nabu”, “Hey Jarvis” or “Hey Mycroft” to talk to Assist. If you want to get fancy, you can Write a custom wake word.

The assistant can be run locally in the home without the need for Home Assistant hardware (e.g. Home Assistant Green Center), or you can use Home Assistant Cloud. According to Nabu Casa, the latter is faster and Support more languages. The company says your data is not stored in the cloud or used for training.

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When Voice PE is listening, the colored LED ring lights up.
Picture: Nabu Kasa

For those who don’t like the idea of ​​companies like Amazon and Google having microphones always listening in their homes, but still want the convenience of voice-controlled homes, the potential here is huge. But it might be a while before Voice PE replaces your Echo or Nest smart speaker.

edgeCallie Wright (Home Assistant Super User) has been testing Voice PE for a few weeks. While they’re impressed with its capabilities (albeit having some difficulty understanding them over background noise), they’re not ready to kick Alexa to the curb just yet. “I think Amazon’s Alexa is still worth the privacy sacrifice for me because there are some key things that Voice PE can’t achieve for me,” they said. “But the progress Home Assistant has made in the Year of Sound is incredible, and I’m more hopeful than ever that the future is just around the corner.”

While the goal is to surpass “big tech voice assistants,” Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen admits it’s not there yet. Therefore, Voice will be available as a preview. “For some people, the current capabilities of our voice assistant will meet their needs, especially those who just want to set timers, manage shopping lists and control their most commonly used devices,” Schoutsen said. “For other people, we know they want to ask their voice assistant to make a whale sound or tell them how tall Taylor Swift is — our voice assistant doesn’t do those things… However”.

Meanwhile, if you want more features, Voice PE can Connect to supported AI modelssuch as ChatGPT or Gemini, to completely replace Assist or use it as a fallback for commands it doesn’t understand. But for many smart home users, there will be great value in a simple, inexpensive device that allows you to turn lights on and off, start timers, and perform other useful commands via voice without relying on an Internet connection. .

2024-12-19 21:00:00

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