The era of open voice assistants has arrived
Long story short: View product page
We all deserve a voice assistant that doesn’t collect our data and arbitrarily limit functionality. Just like home assistants have made private and local home automation a viable option, we believe voice assistants can and must do the same.
Ever since we started developing the open source voice assistant for Home Assistant, we’ve been missing one key ingredient: great hardware that’s easy to set up and use. Hardware that listens to you, gives you clear feedback, and fits seamlessly into your home. Affordable, high-quality voice hardware will allow more people to join its development, allowing anyone to Preview The future of today’s voice assistants. Setting standards for the coming years as a foundation for our growth.
We are launching Home Assistant Voice Preview Help accelerate our goal of not just matching the capabilities of existing voice assistants, but exceeding them. It’s inevitable: they will focus on monetizing voice, while our community will focus on improving open and private voice. We’ll support languages that big tech ignores and give you real choice in how you run voice in your home.
The era of open, private voice assistants has begun, and we want you to be a part of it.
Table of contents
Home Assistant Voice Preview Launched
Our main goal with the Voice Preview is to create the best entry hardware assistthe built-in voice assistant of Home Assistant. If you already use other third-party hardware to run Assist, this will be a significant upgrade. We prioritized its ability to hear commands, equipping it with an industry-leading dedicated audio processor and dual microphones – I’m always blown away by its ability to pick up my voice in the room.
Next, we made sure it blended into the home and gave it a stylish but unobtrusive design. That’s not to say it doesn’t have flair. The first thing you’ll notice when you get the Voice Preview Edition is its premium-feeling, injection-molded casing that’s translucent, just like your favorite ’90s tech. The LED ring is also very eye-catching and can be customized to your liking, from full gamer RGB to a subtle glow.
It’s hard to describe how good the rotary dial is to use. Its subtle click sound combined with LED animation makes it hard not to try it. Best of all, the knob allows anyone in the home to intuitively adjust the volume. The same goes for the multi-function button and mute switch (which physically cuts power to the microphone for ultimate privacy). We know that in order for it to work best, it needs to be public, let’s just say that family approval factors
We’ve also worked hard to keep the price affordable and comparable to other voice assistant hardware, at just $59 (this is the suggested MSRP, pricing will vary by retailer). This is not a pre-order, but is available now!
Why Choose Preview
For some people, our voice assistants are all they need; they just want to speak a few commands, set timers, manage shopping lists and control their most used devices. For everyone else, we know they’ll want to ask their voice assistant to make a whale sound or tell them how tall Taylor Swift is — this voice assistant doesn’t quite do those things (However). We feel there is more we can do before it is ready for every home and until then we will be selling it Preview The future of voice assistants. We build the best hardware on the market and set a new standard for years to come, allowing us to focus our development efforts on preparing voice assistants for every home. Taking back our privacy isn’t for everyone – it’s a journey – and we want as many people as possible to join us early and make it better.
Built for home assistants
Many other voice assistants work with Home Assistant, but this one built For home assistant. Unlike other voice hardware that works with Assist, this does not require a firmware refresh or any components. Just plug it in and Home Assistant will discover it seamlessly. The wizard will immediately start helping you set up your voice assistant, but more importantly, if you haven’t used voice before, it will quickly walk you through what you need to do for the best experience.
Get up and running with Speech Preview in just minutes with our new wizard
This is not a DIY product. We’re committed to making the experience as smooth as possible, so you can quickly and easily update and manage settings through the Home Assistant UI.
Advanced audio processing
If you’ve been following our work on voice, you know that we’ve tried a lot of different voice assistant hardware. Most accessibility hardware available does a poor job at its most important job – hearing your voice and then providing audiovisual feedback. That was really our motivation for building the Voice Preview.
Our helper software can only do so much with substandard audio, and its functionality is greatly improved with clear audio. Dual microphones combined with the XMOS audio processing chip are what make it so powerful. Together, they give Voice Preview features echo cancellation, static noise cancellation, and automatic gain control, all of which result in clearer audio. Combined with the ESP32-S3 with 8 MB of octal PSRAM, one of the fastest ESP and RAM combinations, the result is an extremely responsive device. This is the best Assist hardware you can buy today, and it will continue to deliver a great experience as the Assist feature set expands in the coming years.
Bringing choice to voice
Assist can do almost everything no other voice assistant can— It works without internet 🤯. You can speak to the voice preview, and the commands can be handled entirely from your home. At the time of writing this article, there are some very important caveats, in particular you need to say Supported languages And have very powerful hardware to run it (we recommend Home Assistant systems running on Intel N100 or higher).
Cloud and local speech processing diagram
If you’re using low-power home assistant hardware, there’s a simple and affordable internet-based solution; Home Assistant Cloud. This privacy-focused service allows you to offload speech-to-text and text-to-speech processing while maintaining fast responses and keeping energy bills low. Speech-to-text is the harder of the two to run locally, while our cloud processing is almost always more accurate for more languages (visit our Language support checker is here).
Our goal is to make Assist easily, cost-effectively and fully natively available for all languages. As someone who has watched this technology develop rapidly over the past few years, I am optimistic that this will happen, but until then, many languages have a range of options that can provide strong privacy.
Completely open and customizable
If you want to 3D print new cases, we are sharing design files…these are unavoidable
We don’t just launch new products; We’re open sourcing all of this. We built this for the home assistant community. Our community doesn’t want a voice assistant, they want a voice assistant that works for them — they want choice. Creating voice assistants is difficult, and so far, some solutions have been locked behind expensive licenses and proprietary software. With the Voice Preview open sourced, we hope to bootstrap the voice assistant ecosystem.
We tried to make every aspect of the Voice Preview customizable, and it’s actually very easy when you work with ESPHome and Home Assistant. It’s very suitable for the stock setup, but you can customize the helper software, ESP32 firmware, and XMOS firmware if you wish.
Connecting the Grove Sensor allows you to use the Voice Preview Edition as a more traditional ESPHome device – here it acts as both a voice assistant and an air monitor.
We also make the hardware easy to modify, both internally and externally. For example, the included speakers are for alarms and voice prompts, but if you want to use it as a media player, connect the speakers to the included 3.5mm headphone jack and use something like music assistant
We also use easy-to-access screws and no clamps, making opening a breeze. We even added exposed pads to the board to make modifications easier. we are providing all 3D files
community driven
The beauty of Home Assistant and ESPHome is that you’re never alone when it comes to solving problems or adding features. We made this device so that the community could start working more closely together on voice; we even considered calling it community version. Ultimately, what will drive voice forward is the community—either participating in its development or supporting its development by purchasing official hardware or a home assistant cloud. A lot of work has been done on voice, and I can’t wait to see the progress we make together.
in conclusion
home assistant values Champion’s choice. Today, we offer one of the best selections of voice hardware. A truly private and completely open place. I’m really proud of the team for building such a great job and feeling hardware – it’s a really huge leap forward for voice hardware. I expect it to become the hardware benchmark for open voice projects in the coming years. I’d also like to thank our language leaders who are expanding the reach of this project, our preview testers, and anyone who has joined our voice efforts over the past few years.
The hardware is really only half of the picture, it’s the software that really brings it all together. Mike Hansen just wrote Voice Chapter 8 Blog Along with this launch, here’s a look at everything we’ve built over the past two years to make Assist work in today’s homes. He also highlighted everything the Speech Preview has been built to help speed development.
See what the sound can do today
2024-12-20 00:29:57