As Snowden told us, video and audio recording capabilities of your devices are NSA spying vectors. OSS/Linux is a safeguard against such capabilities. The massive datacenter investments in US will be used to classify us all into a patriotic (for Israel)/Oligarchist social credit score, and every mega tech company can increase profits through NSA cooperation, and are legally obligated to cooperate with all government orders.
Speech to text and speech automation are useful tech, though always listening state sponsored terrorists is a non-NSA targeted path for sweeping future social credit classifications of your past life.
Some small LLMs that can be used for speech to text: https://modal.com/blog/open-source-stt
There also used to be an open source Alexa-like kind of smart speaker that went by Mycroft AI. They were doing crowd funding I believe but that didn’t go anywhere and so they eventually stopped working on it. You can still find their stuff on YouTube though: https://www.youtube.com/@MycroftAIForEveryone/videos
Home Assistant has been heavily working on that sort of functionality lately.
Home assistant continues to be fantastic, I remember it was what felt like fairly recently that all we had was OpenHAB and although it was fine, it was a bit of an uphill struggle to do anything.
There were like, about two years between OpenHAB and HA being released. Former debuted in 2011, HA saw first release in 2013.
Oh really? I could have sworn HA was a fair bit later than that
I think I used OpenHAB between about 2013 and 2018, then switched to HA around then after discovering it and reading about it for a couple of weeks.
Must have just had my head in the sand then!
I mean, there are many. TTS and self-hosted automation are huge in the local LLM scene.
We even have open source “omni” models now, that can ingest and output speech tokens directly (which means they get more semantic understanding from tone and such, they ‘choose’ the tone to reply with, and that it’s streamable word-by-word). They support all sorts of tool calling.
…But they aren’t easy to run. It’s still in the realm of homelabs with at least an RTX 3060 + hacky python projects.
If you’re mad, you can self-host Longcat Omni
https://huggingface.co/meituan-longcat/LongCat-Flash-Omni
And blow Alexa out of the water with a MIT-licensed model from, I kid you not, a Chinese food delivery company.
EDIT
For the curious, see:
Audio-text-to-text (and sometimes TTS): https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=audio-text-to-text&num_parameters=min%3A6B&sort=modified
TTS: https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=text-to-speech&num_parameters=min%3A6B&sort=modified
“Anything-to-anything,” generally image/video/audio/text -> text/speech: https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=any-to-any&num_parameters=min%3A6B&sort=modified
Bigger than 6B to exclude toy/test models.
I do wish there was a smaller LongCat model available. My current AI node has a hard 16GB VRAM limit (yay AMD UMA limitations), so 27B can’t really fit. An 8B dynamically loaded model would fit, and run much better.
It’s not lack of software, it’s lack of hardware. Home assistant is ready as are others, but there’s no good cheap mic/speaker/esp in a box hardware
The HA Voice Preview is a pretty solid device, but you’re right, there isn’t really any ready made Echo/Google Home Mini replacement device - primarily because all those devices are generally sold at a loss, or at cost at best, and subsidised by your data being sold.
You won’t be able to make a Google Home Mini contender for below $50, and at that price most people will opt for the former. Good quality speakers, microphones, local processing (like the XMOS chip in the Voice Preview) all cost money, and there’s no subsidy to be made. Some older Echo devices are rootable, but the hardware tends to be somewhat exotic (meaning no open source support for specialised components), and there’s little ongoing third party support (focus has been on the display-equipped models, and to run Android on them).
All in all, “cheap” and “fully local open source voice assistant” don’t really coexist.
No, home assistant very much is not ready to replace an Alexa device. Home assistant mainly only does automation of smart devices, and as far as i can see from their website it does nothing else. One of the main things people use Alexa for is to play music from services like Spotify, and home assistant doesn’t appear to do that.
Home assistant has a voice assistant feature
It does, but it still has the same inabilities as the screen interface has
Sorry… my experience has been trying to move my google home to something open with no cloud… it’s not been perfect for me after moving. Definitely things missing, but lots of things are better. Spotify does work with home assistant… maybe look again or send a pr
It isn’t listed anywhere on their homepage or example demos or anywhere listing its capabilities, so i did a web search to find it and I found that it sorta just kinda can do Spotify, but (1.) that isn’t listed anywhere on the home assistant abilities listing pages, which shows just how not ready for the mass market it is, and (2.) takes a ridiculous amount of very techie setup just to get it to work
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/spotify/
And also, out of the box can i ask it to:
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tell me the weather?
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set a timer?
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set an alarm?
I don’t see anything on the website that says it can do these things. And even if it can (which doesn’t appear to be the case from their website) then the fact that the website doesn’t say it can do these things is a problem in itself that shows it isn’t ready for the mass market
Just look at the webpage for Alexa vs. Home Assistant and it’s clear that Alexa has a very wide variety of abilities and is designed to be easy to use by anyone, while the home assistant website only shows it doing smart device automation and looks like it’s not for regular folks
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCCNHWV5
https://www.home-assistant.io/
I would LOVE to replace my Alexa devices with a local FOSS system, but unfortunately home assistant isn’t close to being able to do that yet
I’m sorry, what?
Googling “home assistant Spotify” results in the very link you’ve provided.
And you can hardly expect a project like Home Assistant, with THOUSANDS of first party integrations, to cater to your specific needs, or to provide preferential treatment to companies like Spotify, who provide absolutely no support to the project.
It also doesn’t require a “techie setup”, but following a quite straightforward guide, that culminates in clicking about maybe a dozen buttons (most of them being “I accept” to various terms and policies), then copying a handful of readily provided strings into the right fields. It’s simple enough that even my tech illiterate father can do it.
Home Assistant at the end of the day is NOT an Alexa (or other voice assistant) replacement, but a smarthome control hub OS. That it provides a voice assistant interface is quite secondary to its main mission.
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Time to get a mic for my home server!
