Home Assistant Voice

[Pabla]

Not yet!! I have been waiting for something with a little bit better audio, think Sonos level. Do report back though

[CatmanV2]

I won't be using it for music. I have a full Cyrus stack with Vienna Acoustics for music Only want the interactive voice options

C

[gwp1]

@CatmanV2 not yet - I'm letting other kinds go in the pool first.

[CatmanV2]

Oh god! Am I a trail blazer? This won't end well!

Voice control / interaction is very much my thing. It's the future I was promised, and I'm still tapping away on 102 switches

C

[CatmanV2]

Well, so far so 'OK' Took a fair while to set up. One of the wake phrases absolutely does not work for me 'Hey Jarvis'
I think getting all the devices I have decent aliases so it knows what to control may take some time.
Local processing on a VM with 2 CPUs and 4G of RAM is pretty slow. Takes about 10 seconds to action an switch and fails to understand about 20% of the time. Hybrid is much faster.
Audio quality of the voice response is really not great. There are plenty voices to chose from, but none of them as polished as Alexa (so far)

I think I have much to learn so not writing it off just yet.

C

[akbooer]

I didn’t go the HA route, but have voice control through Apple HomeKit and Siri. Works OK, but don’t use it much.

[toggledbits]

I'm in. Let's see what we can get done with this, shall we?

I'm also looking at some other open source solutions that aren't HA-specific.

[CatmanV2]

@akbooer I have Alexa that works really well for most voice control, but doesn't interact with HA. I have virtual switches in OpenLuup that are exposed HA bridge, so effectively I simply ask to flip a switch and the automation follows.

The exception is my Logitech Elite hubs which integrate with Alexa directly (and also work really well)

@toggledbits that would be awesome. I'm keen on the more interactive stuff (i.e. where the VA prompts for activity)

Certainly I can make Alexa speak, but a simple 'yes' or 'no' response isn't going to get anything from her.

C

[Venom]

I set one of these up a few months ago. I got it working pretty easily. It controls everything My Amazon Echo Alexa could do. My Logitech Harmony Hubs work better with the Home Assistant Voice. Alexa seems to have a problem here and there telling me the device is not responding. Then I give the same command to HAV and it works. I did activate Alexa in Home assistant and it works pretty well. As mentioned the lag with the HAV was pretty long. As a test I tried the Home Assistant cloud service. That cut down the lag a lot. Now it is only slightly slower than Alexa. I am going to try building a dedicated AI PC. That should cut the lag to zero and I can get rid of the cloud service. Once I get the HAV to react quickly and do everything as I would like I will move on to improving sound quality.

[CatmanV2]

Given I'm starting from zero on this particular path it would be interestting to see how you set it up. Took me about 90 minutes to get a light to turn on! The documentation I've found so far is, well, poor

TIA

C

[Venom]

This morning I noticed an update was available for Home Assistant Voice. I did the update and it broke the HAV. I had to re-enable it along with the Cloud Service to get it working again.
I got mine working by watching a lot of Youtube Videos. I would start by watching the newest videos you find. That is important. The one thing I noticed with Home Assistant in general, Updates come very often and instructions you find today may be different after an update. I also read lots in the Home Assistant Forum. Same goes there, read the latest posts first. What I did 6 months ago, if I could remember what I did, probably would not be the way to do it today. I keep planning on really learning the most I can about Home Assistant but life keeps getting in the way. So I continue to stumble my way through it..

[CatmanV2]

Cheers! I shall try and make some time
(Is it just me that hates having to watch videos? Can't we just have instructions written down? )

C

[Venom]

@CatmanV2

You can find lots of written instructions in the Home Assistant forums. The problem I found was that when I went into the HA Settings I could not find many of the items the instructions mentioned. They had already been changed by updates to HA. That is why I mentioned looking at the newest posts and videos. I found that the Youtube videos seem to have the latest tips and instructions. While I love all the frequent advancements and updates being made in HA, it can be rather difficult for someone new to HA to jump in and get everything working.

[CatmanV2]

Thanks (again) I have found this

C

[CatmanV2]

OK, so digging through stuff. Definite progress. I've got an OpenAI integration running, but just been told that 'Max output tokens reached' which seems a little odd as I've used precisely $0.01

Must go out now!

C