For those of us still impatiently waiting, what is your experience so far with “Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition”?
—- I ordered just 2 hours in but the vendor I used sold out in 21 minutes. I just found out I also missed the restock, so hopefully some time next month.
I don’t want my comment to come off negative towards the product because my experience has less to do with the speaker itself in more to do with my expectations but i’m less than impressed with it at the moment.
I was watching the live stream and bought one the moment they said sales were live, took about a week to get in. Having never used assist within home assistant before i thought at the very least i could say “turn off the kitchen” and the software would know there was a room called kitchen and turn anything off in it. Nope.
I will eventually get around to setting up my own local llm once i get the right hardware but i don’t understand all these people “glad to drop alexa and google” just to feed their data into a public online llm. Feels worse to me in some ways.
Currently it lives in my bedroom and the speaker is a bit to tin/treb to work for our sound machine but a $10 aux speaker did well enough with that. I had to manually plug phrases i want it to do into an automation but once i did that everything worked fine. At the end of the day, though, if i’m using an additional speaker i don’t understand why i should pay $60 for this when i could get the components and diy one for less than $35.
In the end, I guess I trust Nabu Casa infinitely more than Google/Amazon. I’ll do without if it means having their wiretaps in my house. At least HA is trying to give us local voice assist. That was never going to happen with the others.
You misunderstand my statement. The way i see people making this device better is by either having thousands of dollars of gpu hardware and running their own robust local model or sending their data off to something like chat gpt. The first i have no issue with, if only i had the budget for, the second feels worse to me than alexa. I know amazon knows a lot about me, i don’t need to start feeding all my data to an additional cloud entity.
I love everything Nabu Casa is doing and even though i don’t use any of the perks it offers i still pay for their monthly service to continue supporting them.
If you have a sub to HA Cloud, you should be able to use their Cloud Voice service. I find that’s less than a second of latency on any commands I give my Voice assist.
My point was just that I guess I trust NC with that, but I wouldn’t do the same with the other two. But I’m still moving to local when I get sufficient hardware to equal that latency.