Hey, Home Assistant, don’t share this with an ad firm — Can you manage your house with a local, no-cloud voice assistant? Mostly, yes. If you’re tired of Alexa and Google listening, local voice is a real thing now.
Kevin Purdy – Feb 14, 2024 11:30 am UTC Enlarge / The most impressive part is what Home Assistant’s voice control does not do: share your voice input with a large entity aiming to sell you things.Kevin Purdy reader comments 5
Last year, the leaders of Home Assistant declared 2023 the Year of the Voice. The goal was to let users of the DIY home automation platform control Home Assistant in their own language. It was a bold shot to call, given peoples expectations from using Alexa and the like. Further, the Home Assistant team wasnt even sure where to start.
Did they succeed, looking in from early 2024? In a very strict sense, yes. Right now, with some off-the-shelf gear and the patience to flash and fiddle, you can ask Nabu or Jarvis or any name you want to turn off some lights, set the thermostat, or run automations. And you can ask about the weather. Narrowly defined mission: Accomplished.
In a broader, more accurate sense, Home Assistant voice control has a ways to go. Your verb set is limited to toggling, setting, and other smart home interactions. The easiest devices to use for this dont have the best noise cancellation or pick-up range. Errors arent handled gracefully, and you get the best results by fine-tuning the names you call everything you control.
Its not entirely fair to compare locally run, privacy-minded voice control to the assistants offered by globe-spanning tech companies with secondary motives. Paulus Schoutsen, founder of Home Assistant, knows this, but hes motivated to keep improving anyway. Schoutsen told Ars that people tend to arrive at Home Assistant after starting out with one of the big three: Amazons Alexa, Googles Assistant, or Apples Siri. Theyre outgrowers, so they come to us. Were their second system, Schoutsen said. Advertisement
While outgrowers are happy to leave behind the inconsistent behavior, privacy concerns, or limitations of their old systems, they can miss being able to just shout from anywhere in a room and have a device figure out their intent. Or, failing that, their kids want music to play when they say, Play Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift in the kitchen. Home Assistant is not there yet, and in some ways is not meant to be that kind of system, at least by default. But it’s improving, and it has come a very long way.
Heres a look at what you can do today with your human voice and Home Assistant, what remains to be fixed and made easier, and how it got here. The wake word settings inside Home Assistant’s Voice Assistant settings, once you’ve set up your system.Kevin Purdy The open source to-do list
As it stands today, were not ready yet to tell people that our voice assistant is a replacement for Google/Amazon, Schoutsen wrote. We dont have to be as good as their systems, but there is a certain bar of usable that we havent reached yet.
Key among the improvements that need to happen, according to Schoutsen: Audio input needs to be cleaned up (speaker voice separated) before it is processed Error messages need to be more clear about whats going wrong, and input has to have more flexibility Non-English languages need a lot of commands and variables Compatible hardware that features far-listening microphones has to be more widely available Most people will want local processing to be faster
All that said, its impressive how far Home Assistant has come since late 2022, when it made its pronouncement, despite not really having a clear path toward its end goal. A more visually interesting version of Home Assistant’s wake word potential. Page: 1 2 3 Next → reader comments 5 Kevin Purdy Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering a variety of technology topics and reviewing products. He started his writing career as a newspaper reporter, covering business, crime, and other topics. He has written about technology and computing for more than 15 years. Advertisement Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Related Stories Today on Ars
