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Can you manage your house with a local, no-cloud voice assistant? Mostly, yes. (arstechnica.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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“As it stands today, we’re not ready yet to tell people that our voice assistant is a replacement for Google/Amazon,” Schoutsen wrote. “We don’t have to be as good as their systems, but there is a certain bar of usable that we haven’t 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 what’s 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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

It’s not entirely fair to compare locally run, privacy-minded voice control to the “assistants” offered by globe-spanning tech companies with secondary motives.

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.

Here’s 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.

All that said, it’s 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.

And the work continues; between writing and publishing this post, Home Assistant has already improved its voice error responses.

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