There's a new voice assistant in town, and it can work locally in your home without phoning home due to corporate overload. This week, the popular hobbyist smart home platform Home Assistant officially launched Its first voice assistant hardware – Home Assistant Voice Preview Version,
Built for the open-source smart home platform, Voice PE costs $59 And brings a locally controlled, privacy-focused voice assistant to the home assistant in a plug-and-play package. once connected house assistantyou can use voice Control any connected deviceWith commands like “turn on the living room lights,” “close all the doors,” “make a timer for 5 minutes” and so on. Too much,
While home assistant users are able to control their smart homes using voice home helper's help But Less capable third-party hardware or by connecting to third-party services through the cloud amazon alexa And Google AssistantIt is the first dedicated home assistant voice hardware product.
Voice is the pinnacle of PE Home Assistant Voice of the YearAn effort by Nabu Kasa, the organization behind Home Assistant, it lets users control their homes locally, privately, and in their own language. It is currently Supports over 50 languagesCompared to eight for Alexa and 20 for Google Assistant.
The Voice PE is a small white box about the size of your palm, with dual microphones and an audio processor. An internal speaker lets you listen to the Assistant, but you can also connect a speaker to it via the 3.5mm headphone jack for better quality media playback.
Out of the box, you can talk to Assist with the words “Ok Naboo,” “Hey Jarvis,” or “Hey Mycroft.”
A colored LED ring at the top of the Voice PE indicates when the Assistant is listening. It's flanked by a rotary dial and a physical button, which are used for setup and to talk to the voice assistant without using a wake word. You can also customize the buttons to do whatever you want (since it's a home assistant). A physical mute switch is on the side, and the device 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, right out of the box, you can talk to Assist with the wake words “Okay Naboo,” “Hey Jarvis,” or “Hey Mycroft.” If you want to be fancy, you can Program a Custom Wake Word,
The Assistant can run locally without an Internet connection in your home on home assistant hardware (like Home Assistant Green Hub), or can use home assistant cloudAccording to Nabu Kasa, the latter is faster and supports more languagesThe company says your data is not stored on the cloud nor used for training.
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For those who don't like the idea of always-listening microphones from companies like Amazon and Google in their home, but who still want the convenience of controlling their home with their voice, the possibilities here are huge. But it may take some time before the Voice PE is ready to replace your Echo or Nest smart speaker.
The VergeKelly Wright, a Home Assistant superuser, has been testing Voice PE for a few weeks. While they're impressed by its capabilities (although they had some trouble understanding when there's background noise), they're not quite ready to stop Alexa. “I think Amazon's Alexa is still worth the privacy tradeoff for me because there are some important things for me that voice PE can't accomplish,” he says. “But the progress that home assistants have made in the voice year has been incredible, and I'm more optimistic than ever that that future is coming.”
While the intention is to overtake the “Big Tech voice assistant”, Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen admits it's not there yet. So, Voice is launching as a preview version. “For some people, our voice assistant's existing capabilities will be all they need,” says Schoutsen, “especially those who just want to set timers, manage their shopping lists, and access their most-used apps.” Want to control devices.” “For others, we understand that they want to ask their voice assistant to make a whale noise or tell them how tall Taylor Swift is – our voice assistant doesn't do those things… As yet,
Meanwhile, if you want more features, Voice PE can Connect to supported AI modelsLike ChatGPT or Gemini, to replace Assist entirely or to use it as a fallback for commands it doesn't understand. But for many smart home users, there will be a lot of value in a simple, affordable device that lets you turn your lights on and off, start timers, and execute other useful commands with your voice without relying on an Internet connection. .