Comment by xp84

Comment by xp84 11 hours ago

4 replies

View on Hacker News

I love it! But my setup has a lot of sharp edges. It's a combo of things where the "standards compatible" way to connect to HA lacks things like camera control, by dastardly vendors like Chamberlain who basically killed HA support for spite, and finally, by having to use Google or Amazon for voice assistants.

My #1 wish would be for someone to build a HA-native voice assistant speaker. I'd pay $100 each for a smart speaker of the physical quality of the $30 Google Home Mini but which integrated directly with HA and used a modern LLM to decide what the user's intent was, instead of the Google Assistant or Siri nonsense which is like playing a text adventure whose preferred syntax changes hourly. I'd pay that plus a monthly fee to have that exist and just work.

projektfu 10 hours ago

Chamberlain can't change MyQ to get around the fact that HA can operate the switch in your garage with a simple controller attached to it. It is very annoying that they are anti-hacker though.

Reply View 0 replies
paddleon 11 hours ago

or roll your own.

This M5 Stack ASR unit costs $7.50, and has a vocab of about 40-70 words. That's enough to turn on/off lights and timers. You might need to come up with your own command language, but all of the ASR is extremely local

https://shop.m5stack.com/products/asr-unit-with-offline-voic...

Reply View 1 reply
  • xp84 10 hours ago

    That is probably a great and fun way to solve the problem for those with even a little free time.

    Sadly for family reasons I sadly can't take on projects that require more than a few minutes, so I'm holding out hope for someone to bridge the gap between the "project boards that require writing a bunch of code to interface with Home Assistant and define all of its possible abilities and commands" and "dumb as a post Google thing that you just plug in" with a hardware device that is easy to connect to HA and starts out doing what the Google thing can do, but smart instead of stupid like the legacy voice assistants are.

    Reply View 0 replies