[HN Gopher] The era of open voice assistants
___________________________________________________________________
The era of open voice assistants
Author : _Microft
Score : 658 points
Date : 2024-12-20 00:29 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.home-assistant.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.home-assistant.io)
| jfim wrote:
| That's a pretty timely release considering Alexa and the Google
| assistant devices seem to have plateaued or are on the decline.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Curious what you mean by that.
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| For me the Alexa devices I own have gotten worse. Can't do
| simple things (setting a timer used to be instant, now it
| takes 10-15 seconds of thinking assuming it heard properly),
| playing music is a joke (will try to play through Deezer even
| though I disaled that integration months ago, and then will
| default to Amazon Music instead of Spotify which is set as
| the default).
|
| And then even simple skills can't understand what I'm asking
| 60% of the time. The first maybe 2 years after launch it
| seemed like everything worked pretty good but since then it's
| been a frustrating decline.
|
| Currently they are relagated to timers and music, and it
| can't even manage those half the time anymore.
| interludead wrote:
| That aligns with some of the frustration I've heard from
| others. It's surprising (and disappointing) how these
| platforms, which seemed to have so much potential early on,
| have started to feel more like a liability
| lelag wrote:
| It is, I think, a common feeling among Echo/Alexa users.
| Now that people are getting used to the amazing
| understanding capabilities of ChatGPT and the likes, it
| probably increases the frustration level because you get a
| hint of how good it could be.
|
| I believe it boils down to two main issues:
|
| - The narrow AI systems used for intent inference have not
| scaled with the product features.
|
| - Amazon is stuck and can't significantly improve it using
| general AI due to costs.
|
| The first point is that the speech-to-intent algorithms
| currently in production are quite basic, likely based on
| the state of the art from 2013. Initially, there were few
| features available, so the device was fairly effective at
| inferring what you wanted from a limited set of
| possibilities. Over time, Amazon introduced more and more
| features to choose from, but the devices didn't get any
| smarter. As a result, mismatches between actual intent and
| inferred intent became more common, giving the impression
| that the device is getting dumber. In truth, it's probably
| getting somewhat smarter, but not enough to compensate for
| the increasing complexity over time.
|
| The second point is that, clearly, it would be relatively
| straightforward to create a much smarter Alexa: simply
| delegate the intent detection to an LLM. However, Amazon
| can't do that. By 2019, there were already over 100 million
| Alexa devices in circulation, and it's reasonable to assume
| that number has at least doubled by now. These devices are
| likely sold at a low margin, and the service is free. If
| you start requiring GPUs to process millions of daily
| requests, you would need an enormous, costly
| infrastructure, which is probably impossible to justify
| financially--and perhaps even infeasible given the sheer
| scale of the product.
|
| My prediction is that Amazon cannot save the product, and
| it will die a slow death. It will probably keep working for
| years but will likely be relegated by most users to a
| "dumb" device capable of little more than setting alarms,
| timers, and providing weather reports.
|
| If you want Jarvis-like intelligence to control your home
| automation system, the vision of a local assistant using
| local AI on an efficient GPU, as presented by HA, is the
| one with the most chance of succeeding. Beyond the privacy
| benefits of processing everything locally, the primary
| reason this approach may become common is that it scales
| linearly with the installation.
|
| If you had a cloud-based solution using Echo-like devices,
| the problem is that you'd need to scale your cloud
| infrastructure as you sell more devices. If the service is
| good, this could become a major challenge. In contrast, if
| you sell an expensive box with an integrated GPU that does
| everything locally, you deploy the infrastructure as you
| sell the product. This eliminates scaling issues and the
| risks of growing too fast.
| freedomben wrote:
| It seems ridiculous to me that this comment is so down
| voted. It's a thoughtful and interesting comment, and
| contains a reasonable and even likely explanation for
| what we've seen, once one puts aside the bottom that
| Amazon is just evil, which isn't a useful way to think of
| you truly want to understand the world and motivations.
|
| I'm guessing people reflexively down vote because they
| hate Amazon and it could read like a defense. I hate
| Amazon too, but emotional voting is unbecoming of HN. If
| you want emotional voting reddit is available and
| enormous.
| imiric wrote:
| I didn't downvote it, but claiming that Echo/Alexa are
| behind because of financial reasons is misguided at best.
|
| Amazon is one of the richest companies on the planet,
| with vast datacenters that power large parts of the
| internet. If they wanted to improve their AI products
| they certainly have the resources to do so.
| thanksgiving wrote:
| How do you justify to your manager to spend (and more
| importantly commit to spending for a long time) hundreds
| of millions of dollars in aws resources every year? Sure,
| you already have the hardware but that's a different org,
| right? You can't expect them to give you those resources
| for free. Also, voice needs to be instant. You can't say
| 'Well, the AWS instances are currently expensive. Try
| again when my spot prices are lower."
|
| I am sure you know this but maybe some don't know that
| basically only the hot word detection is on device. It
| needs to be connected to the Internet for basically
| everything else. It already costs Amazon.com some money
| to run this infrastructure. What we are asking will cost
| more and you can't really charge the users more. I
| personally would definitely not sign up for a paid
| subscription to use Amazon Alexa.
| baq wrote:
| Alexa is probably a cool billion under or something. They
| never figured out how to make money with it.
| gorbachev wrote:
| Even the richest company in the world doesn't run
| unprofitable projects forever.
|
| Just see Killed by Google.
| imiric wrote:
| That depends on the company. There is precedent of large
| companies keeping unprofitable projects alive because
| they can make up for it in other ways, or it's good for
| marketing, etc. I.e. the razor and blades business model.
|
| Perhaps Echo/Alexa entice users to become Prime members,
| and they're not meant to be market leaders. We can only
| speculate as outsiders.
|
| My point is that claiming that a product of one the
| richest companies on Earth is not as subjectively good as
| the competition because of financial reasons is far-
| fetched.
| stavros wrote:
| I think the economics here are wrong by orders of
| magnitude. It doesn't make sense to deploy to the home an
| expensive GPU that will sit idle 99% of the time, unless
| running an LLM gets much cheaper, computationally. It's
| much cheaper to run it on-premise and charge a
| subscription, otherwise nobody would pay for ChatGPT and
| would have an LLM rig at home instead.
| lelag wrote:
| You are right, but that's not my point. The point is that
| it's difficult to scale in the cloud products that
| requires lots of AI workloads.
|
| Here, home assistant is telling you: you can use your own
| infra (most people won't) or you can use our cloud.
|
| It works because most likely the user base will be rather
| small and home assistant can get cloud resources as if it
| was infinite on that scale.
|
| If their product was amazing, and suddenly millions of
| people wanted to buy the cloud version, they would have a
| big problem: cloud infrastructure is never infinite at
| scale. They would be limited by how much compute their
| cloud provider is able/willing to sell them, rather than
| how much of that small boxes they could sell, possibly
| loosing the opportunity to corner the market with a great
| product.
|
| If you package everything, you don't have that problem
| (you only have the one to be able to make the product,
| which I agree is also not small). But in term of energy
| efficiency, it also does not have to be that bad: the
| apple silicon line has shown that you can have very
| efficient hardware with significant AI capabilities, if
| you design a SOC for that purpose, it can be energy
| efficient.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong that the approach will get common, but
| the fact that scaling AI services to millions of users is
| hard stand.
| stavros wrote:
| But here you're assuming that your datacenter can't
| provide you with X GPUs, but you can manufacture 100X,
| which is dictated by 1% utilization.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| This is very well thought out but I think your premise is
| a bit wrong. I have about a dozen Echos of various
| generations in my house. The oldest one is the very
| original from the preview stage. They still do everything
| I want them to and my entire family still uses them daily
| with zero frustration.
|
| Local GPU doesn't make sense for some of the same reasons
| you list. First, hardware requirements are changing
| rapidly. Why would I spend say $500 on a local GPU setup
| when in two years the LLM running on it will slow to a
| crawl due to limited resources? Probably would make more
| sense to rent a GPU on the cloud and upgrade as new
| generations come out.
|
| Amazon has the opposite situation: their hardware and
| infra is upgraded en masse so different economies. Also
| while your GPU is idling at 20-30W while you aren't home
| they can have 100% utilization of their resources because
| their GPUs are not limited to one customer at a time.
| Plus they can always offload the processing by
| contracting OpenAI or similar. Google is in an even
| better position to do this. Running a local LLM today
| doesn't make a lot of sense, but it probably will at some
| point in like 10 years. I base this on the fact that the
| requirements for a device like a voice assistant are
| limited so at some point the hardware and software will
| catch up. We saw this with smartphones: you can now go 5
| years without upgrading and things still work fine. But
| that wasn't the case 10 years ago.
|
| Second, Amazon definitely goofed. They thought people
| would use the Echos for shopping. They didn't. Literally
| the only uses for them are alarms and timers, controlling
| lights and other smart home devices, and answering trivia
| questions. That's it. What other requirements do you have
| that don't fall in this category? And the Echos do this
| stuff incredibly well. They can do complex variations
| too, including turning off the lights after a timer goes
| off, scheduling lights, etc. Amazon is basically giving
| these devices away but the way to pivot this is to
| release a line of smart devices that connect to the
| Echos: smart bulbs and switches, smart locks, etc. They
| do have TVs which you can control with an Echo fairly
| well (and it is getting better). An ecosystem of smart
| devices that seamlessly interoperate will dwarf what HA
| has to offer (and I say this as someone who is firmly on
| HA's side). And this is Amazon's core competency:
| consumer devices and sales.
|
| If your requirement is that you want Jarvis, it's not the
| voice device part of it that you want. You want what it
| is connected to: a self driving car you can summon,
| DoorDash you can order by saying "I want a pizza", a
| phone line so it can call your insurance company and
| dispute a claim on your behalf.
|
| Now the last piece here is privacy and it's a doozy. The
| only way to solve this for Amazon is to figure out some
| form of encrypted computation that allows for your voice
| prompts to be processed without them ever hearing clear
| voice versions. Mathematically possible, practically not
| so much. But clearly consumers don't give a fuck
| whatsoever about it. They trust Amazon. That's why there
| are hundreds of millions of these devices. So in effect
| while people on HN think they are the target market for
| these devices, they are clearly the opposite. We aren't
| the thought leaders, we are the Luddites. And again I say
| this as someone who wishes there was a way to avoid the
| privacy issue, to have more control over my own tech,
| etc. I run an extensive HA setup but use Echos for the
| voice control because at least for now they are be best
| value. I am excited about TFA because it means there
| might be a better choice soon. But even here a $59 device
| is going to have a hard time competing with one that
| routinely go on sale for $19.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| That's interesting because I have a bunch of Echos of
| various types in my house and my timers and answers are
| instant. Is it possible your internet connection is wonky
| or you have a slow DNS server or congested Wi-Fi? I don't
| have the absolute newest devices but the one in my bedroom
| is the very original Echo that I got during their preview
| stage, the one in my kitchen is the Echo Show 7" and I have
| a bunch of puck ones and spherical ones (don't remember the
| generations) around the house. One did die at one point
| after years of use and got replaced but it was in my kids
| room so I suspect it was subject to some abuse.
| creeble wrote:
| I too get pretty consistent response and answers from
| Alexa these days. There has been some vague decline in
| the quality of answers (I think sometime back they
| removed the ability to ask for Wikipedia data), but have
| no trouble with timers and the few linked wemo switches I
| have.
|
| I'm also the author of an Alexa skill for a music player
| (basic "transport" control mostly) that i use every day,
| and it still works the same as it always did.
|
| Occasionally I'll get some freakout answer or abject
| failure to reply, but it's fairly rare. I did notice it
| was down for a whole weekend once; that's surely related
| to staffing or priorities.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Amazon also fired a large number of people from the Alexa
| team last year. I don't really think Alexa is a major
| priority for Amazon at this point.
|
| I don't blame them, sure there are millions of devices out
| there, but some people might own five device. So there
| aren't as many users as there are devices and they aren't
| making them any money once bought, not like the Kindle.
|
| Frankly I know shockingly few people who uses
| Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant/Bixby. It's not that voice
| assistants don't have a use, be it is a much much small use
| case than initially envisioned and there's no longer the
| money to found the development, the funds went into
| blockchain and LLMs. Partly the decline is because it's not
| as natural an interface as we expected, secondly: to be
| actually useful, the assistants need access to control
| things that we may not be comfortable with, or which may
| pose a liability to the manufacturers.
| bdavbdav wrote:
| GH is basically abandonware at this stage it seems. They just
| seem to break random things, and there haven't been any major
| updates / features for ages (and Gemini is still a way off
| for most).
| cachvico wrote:
| Google Home's Nest integration is recent and top-notch
| though.
|
| Hopefully in a year they'll have rolled out the Gemini
| integration and things will be back on track.
| lolinder wrote:
| On the Google side it's become basically useless for anything
| beyond interacting with local devices and setting timers and
| reminders (in other words, the things that FOSS should be
| able to do very easily). Its only edge over other options
| used to be answering questions quickly without having to pull
| out a screen, but now it refuses to answer anything (likely
| because Google Search has removed their old quick answers in
| favor of Gemini answers).
| stickfigure wrote:
| I was an early adopter of google home, have had several
| generations (including the latest). I quite like the devices,
| but the voice recognition seems to be getting worse not
| better. And the Pandora integration crashes frequently.
|
| In addition, it's a moron. I'm not sure it's actually gotten
| dumber, but in the age of chatgpt, asking google assistant
| for information is worse than asking my 2nd grader. Maybe it
| will be able to quote part of a relevant web page, but half
| the time it screws that up. I just want it to convert my
| voice to text, submit it to chatgpt or claude, and read the
| response back to me.
|
| All that said, the audio quality is good and it shows
| pictures of my kid when idle. If they suddenly disappeared I
| would replace them.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Google and Amazon refuse to put GenAI into their existing
| speakers (which barely function). No doubt they want a new
| product launch to charge more.
| frognumber wrote:
| I don't fully understand the cloud upsell. I have a beefy GPU. I
| would like to run the "more advanced" models locally.
|
| By "I don't fully understand," I mean just that. There's a lot of
| marketing copy, but there's a lot I'd like to understand better
| before plopping down $$$ for a unit. The answers might be
| reasonable.
|
| Ideally, I'd be able to experiment with a headset first, and if
| it works well, upgrade to the $59 unit.
|
| I'd love to just have a README, with a getting started tutorial,
| play, and then upgrade if it does what I want.
|
| Again: None of this is a complaint. I assume much of this is
| coming once we're past preview addition, or is perhaps there and
| my search skills are failing me.
| trb wrote:
| Finding microphones that look nice, can pick up voice at high
| enough quality to extract commands and that cover an entire
| room is surprisingly hard.
|
| If this device delivers on audio quality it's totally worth it
| at $59.
| bdavbdav wrote:
| 100%. For a lot of users that have WAF and time available to
| contend with, this is a steal.
|
| Bear in mind that a $50 google home or Alexa mini(?) is
| always going to be whatever google deem it to be. This is an
| open device which can be whatever you want it to be. That's a
| lot of value in my eyes.
| alias_neo wrote:
| I've found it quite hard to find decent hardware with both
| the input capability needed for wakeword and audio capture at
| a distance, whilst also having decent speaker quality for
| music playback.
|
| I started using the Box-3 with heywillow which did amazing
| input and processing using ML on my GPU, but the speaker is
| aweful. I build a speaker of my own using a raspberry pi Z2W,
| dac and some speakers in a 3d printed enclosure I designed,
| and added a shim to the server so that responses came from my
| speaker rather than the cheap/tiny speaker in the box-3. I'll
| likely do the same now with the Voice PE, but I'm hoping that
| the grove connector can be used to plonk it on top of a
| higher quality speaker unit and make it into a proper music
| player too.
|
| As soon as I have it in my hands, I intend to get straight to
| work looking at a way to modify my speaker design to become
| an addon "module" for the PE.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| The cloud sale is easy if you are an HA user already. If you
| don't use Home Assistant right now, you probably rec it the
| target audience. I purchase the yearly cloud service as it's an
| easy way to support HA development. It also gives you remote
| access to your system without having to do any setup. It
| provides an https connection which allows you to program esp32
| devices through Chrome. And now they added the ability to do
| TTS and STT on someone else's hardware. HA even allows you to
| setup a local llm for house control commands but route other
| queries directly to the cloud.
| frognumber wrote:
| I don't mind paying for hardware. I do mind my privacy, and
| don't want that kind of information in the cloud, or even
| traces from encryption I haven't audited myself.
| Jarwain wrote:
| I can't speak to home assistant specifically, but the last time
| I looked at voice models, supporting multiple languages and
| doing it Really Well just happens to require a model with a
| massive amount of RAM, especially to run at anything resembling
| real-time.
|
| It's be awesome if they open sourced that model though, or
| published what models they're using. But I think it unlikely to
| happen because home assistant is a sorta funnel to nabu casa
|
| That said, from what I can find, it sounds like Assist can be
| run without the hardware, either with or without the cloud
| upgrade. So you could definitely use your own hardware,
| headset, speakers, etc. to play with Assist
| frognumber wrote:
| _shrug_ whisper seems to do well on my GPU, and faster than
| realtime.
| Jarwain wrote:
| Found what I was thinking of [1]
|
| Part of my misremembering is I was thinking of smaller/iot
| usecase which, alongside the 10GB VRAM requirements for the
| large multilingual model, felt infeasible -shrug-
|
| [1] https://git.acelerex.com/automation/opcua.ts/-/project_
| membe...
| antonyt wrote:
| You can do exactly that - set up an Assist pipeline that glues
| together services running wherever you want, including a GPU
| node for faster-whisper. The HA interface even has a screen
| where you can test your pipeline with your computer's
| microphone.
|
| It's not exactly batteries-included, and doesn't exercise the
| on-device wake word detection that satellite hardware would
| provide, but it's doable.
|
| But I don't know that the unit will be an "upgrade" over most
| headsets. These devices are designed to be cheap, low-power,
| and have to function in tougher scenarios than speaking
| directly into a boom mic.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Does it use Node-RED for the pipeline?
| haddonist wrote:
| No, all of the voice parts are either inbuilt or direct
| addons.
| frognumber wrote:
| It's an upgrade mostly because putting on a headset to talk
| to an assistant means it's not worth using the assistant.
| choffee wrote:
| This device is just the mic/speaker/wakeword part. It connects
| to home-assistant to do the decoding and automation. You can
| test it right now by downloading home-assistant and running it
| on a pi or a VM. You can run all the voice assist stuff locally
| if you want. There are services for the voice to text, text to
| voice and what they call intents which are simple things like
| "turn off the lights in the office". The cloud offering from
| Nuba Casa, not only funds the development of Home Assistant but
| also give remote access if you want it. As part of that you can
| choses to offload some of the voice/text services to their
| cloud so that if you are just running it on a Pi it will still
| be fast.
| thumbsup-_- wrote:
| We need more projects like home assistant. I started using it
| recently and was amazed. They sell their own hardware but the
| whole setup is designed to works on any other hardware. There are
| detailed docs for installation on your own hardware. And, it
| works amazingly well.
|
| Same for their voice assistant. You can but their hardware and
| get started right away or you can place your own mics and
| speakers around home and it will still work. You can but your own
| beefy hardware and run your own LLM.
|
| The possibilities with home assistant are endless. Thanks to this
| community for breaking the barriers created by big tech
| mkagenius wrote:
| I am working on automation of phones (open source) -
| https://github.com/BandarLabs/clickclickclick
|
| I haven't been able to quite get the Llama vision models
| working but I suppose with new releases in future, it should
| work as good as Gemini in finding bounding boxes of UI
| elements.
| lokar wrote:
| It's a great project overall, but I've been frustrated by how
| anti-engineer it has been trending.
| thfuran wrote:
| How so?
| sofixa wrote:
| Do you mean the move away from YAML first configs?
|
| I was originally somewhat frustrated, but overall, it's much
| better (let's be honest, YAML sucks) and more user friendly
| (by that I mean having a form with pre-filled fields is
| easier than having to copy paste YAML).
| philjohn wrote:
| It's worse though when you need to add a ton of custom
| sensors at once, e.g., for properly automating a Solar PV +
| Battery solution.
| ncallaway wrote:
| But like, isn't YAML still available for configuring
| things?
|
| Have they gotten rid of any YAML configs, with things
| that are now UI only? My understanding was that they've
| just been building more UI for configuring things and so
| now default recommend people away from YAML (which seems
| like the right choice to me).
| sofixa wrote:
| > But like, isn't YAML still available for configuring
| things?
|
| For most, yes. But for some included integrations it's
| UI-only (all of those I've had to migrate, it's been a
| single click + comment out lines, and the config has been
| a breeze (stuff like just an api key/IP address + 1-2
| optional params).
| lolinder wrote:
| Where and how are those configs stored? There has to be a
| backing representation somewhere, right?
| sofixa wrote:
| In the Home assistant database (which is SQLite IIRC).
| iamjackg wrote:
| UI-generated configs are not stored in the database, they
| end up in a collection of JSON files in a .storage
| directory inside your config directory.
| lokar wrote:
| And there is no real API for you to interact with it. I
| would build my own config system if I could, but they
| don't seem interested.
| lolinder wrote:
| SQLite is highly automatable if you can deal with
| downtime to do your migrations.
|
| I'm sure there are things they could do to _better_
| support the power-user engineer use case, but at the end
| of the day it 's a self-hosted web app written in Python
| that has strong support for plugins. There should be very
| few things that an engineer couldn't figure out how to do
| between writing a plugin, tweaking source code, and just
| modifying files in place. And in the meantime I'm glad
| that it exists and apparently has enough traction to pay
| for itself.
| ramses0 wrote:
| For "integrated" stuff, their stance is "UI Must Work".
| Tracing down the requirements, here:
| https://design.home-assistant.io/#concepts/home
| https://developers.home-
| assistant.io/docs/configuration_yaml_index
| https://github.com/home-
| assistant/architecture/blob/master/adr/0010-integration-
| configuration.md
|
| ...usually there's YAML kicking around the backend, but
| for normal usage, normal users, the goal is to be able to
| configure all (most) things via UI.
|
| I've had to drop to YAML to configure (eg) writing stats
| to indexdb/graphana vs. sqlite (or something), or maybe
| to drop in or update an API_KEY or non-standard
| host/port, but 99% of the time the config is baroque, but
| usable via the web-app.
| philjohn wrote:
| Yes - for now. I think the ultimate end-goal is to get
| rid of the YAML config files, which, makes sense for the
| median user, but not for power users.
|
| For example, I have my config on GitHub and share various
| YAML blueprints with a friend who also has the same
| Solar+Battery system as I do.
| lokar wrote:
| Yes, config is a major part of it. But also a lack of good
| APIs, very poor dev documentation, not great logging. A
| general "take it or leave it" attitude, not interesting in
| enabling engineers to build.
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| Oh thank got. Just started using HA few months ago and all
| these yaml is so confusing when I try to code it with
| ChatGPT , constant syntax or some other random errors.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Install the Node-RED add on. I use that to do the tricky
| stuff.
|
| Install the whole thing on top of stock Debian "supervised"
| then you get a full OS to use.
|
| You get a fully integrated MQTT broker with full provisioning
| - you don't need a webby API - you have an IoT one instead!
|
| This is a madly fast moving project with a lot of different
| audiences. You still have loads of choice all tied up in the
| web interface.
| paradox460 wrote:
| Or the Digital alchemy addon. Let's you write your
| automations using typescript
| interludead wrote:
| Completely agree! Home Assistant feels like a breath of fresh
| air in a space dominated by big tech's walled gardens.
| PhilippGille wrote:
| > We need more projects like home assistant
|
| Isn't openHAB an existing popular alternative?
|
| https://www.openhab.org/
| btreecat wrote:
| HA long ago blew past OpenHAB in functionality and community.
|
| Unless you have a hard-on for JVM services, HA is the better
| XP these days.
| diggan wrote:
| > HA long ago blew past OpenHAB in [...] community.
|
| Home Assistant seems insurmountable to beat at that
| specific metric, seems to be the single biggest project in
| terms of contributions from a wide community. Makes sense,
| Home Assistant tries to do a lot of things, and succeeds at
| many of them.
| yurishimo wrote:
| When I was evaluating both projects about 5 years ago, I
| went with openHAB because they had native apps with native
| controls (and thus nicer design imo). At the time, HA was
| still deep in YML config files and needed validation before
| saving etc etc. Not great UX.
|
| Nowadays, HA has more of the features I would want and
| other external projects exist to create your own dashboards
| that take advantage of native controls.
|
| Today I'm using Homey because I'm still a sucker for design
| and UX after a long day of coding boring admin panels in
| the day job, but I think in another few years when the
| hardware starts to show its age that I will move to home
| assistant. Hell, there exists an integration to bring HA
| devices into Homey but that would require running two hubs
| and potentially duplicating functionality. We shall see.
| tedivm wrote:
| I think they meant "projects with a culture and mindset like
| homeassistant", not just a competitor to the existing
| project.
| Jarwain wrote:
| I'm actually really excited for this!
|
| I noticed recently there weren't any good open source hardware
| projects for voice assistants with a focus on privacy. There's
| another project I've been thinking about where I think the
| privacy aspect is Important, and figuring out a good hardware
| stack has been a Process. The project I want to work on isn't
| exactly a voice assistant, but same ultimate hardware
| requirements
|
| Something I'm kinda curious about: it sounds like they're
| planning on a sorta batch manufacturing by resellers type of
| model. Which I guess is pretty standard for hardware sales. But
| why not do a sorta "group buy" approach? I guess there's nothing
| stopping it from happening in conjunction
|
| I've had an idea floating around for a site that enables group
| buys for open source hardware (or 3d printed items), that also
| acts like or integrates with github wrt forking/remixing
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I invested in Mycroft and it flopped. Here's hoping some others
| can go where they couldn't.
| bdavbdav wrote:
| I guess the difference here is that HA has a huge community
| already. I believe the estimate was around 250k installations
| running actively. I suspect a huge chunk of the HA users venn
| diagram slice fits within the voice users slice.
| balloob wrote:
| Our estimates are more than a million active instances
| https://analytics.home-assistant.io/
| emsixteen wrote:
| More than a million? It says on the page: "424,548 Active
| Home Assistant Installations"
|
| Am I missing something? Is it that these are just those
| you know are sharing details, and you can scale that up
| by a known percentage? :)
| schnapsidee wrote:
| > Analytics in Home Assistant are opt-in and do not
| reflect the entire Home Assistant userbase. We estimate
| that a third of all Home Assistant users opt in.
| alias_neo wrote:
| I'm a big fan of home assistant, and use it to control a
| LOT of my home, have done for years, have tonnes of
| hardware dedicated to and for it, and I've also ordered
| some of these Voice devices.
|
| I'm also opted OUT of the analytics.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| I think Mycroft was unfortunately just ahead of its time. STT
| was just becoming good enough but NLU wasn't quite there yet.
| Add in you're up against Apple Google and Amazon who were
| able to add integrations like music and subsidize the crap
| out of their products.
|
| I just think this time around is different. Open Whisper
| gives them amazing STT and LLMs can far more easily be
| adapted for the NLU portion. The hardware is also dirt cheap
| which makes it better suited to a narrow use case.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| IIRC one of the main devs behind this device came from
| Mycroft.
| dole wrote:
| OP's username checks out.
| robotfelix wrote:
| Yep, Mike Hansen was on the live stream launching the new
| device. He also notably created Rhasspy [1], which is open-
| source voice assistant software for Raspberry Pi (when
| connected to a microphone and speaker).
|
| [1] https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
| tacticalturtle wrote:
| I believe Mycroft was killed in part due to a patent troll:
|
| https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/02/13/linux_ai_assistan.
| ..
|
| Hopefully the troll is no longer around
| NoNotTheDuo wrote:
| I think another part is that there is a failure mechanism
| on their boards that was recently identified: https://commu
| nity.openconversational.ai/t/sj-201-sj201-failu...
|
| The short version, from the post, is that there are 4
| capacitors that are only rated for 6.3v, but the power
| supply is 12v. Eventually one of these capacitors will
| fail, causing the board to stop working entirely.
|
| It would be hard for a company to stay in business when
| they are fighting a patent troll lawsuit and having to
| handle returns on every device they sold through
| kickstarter.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| A group buy for an existing product makes sense. Want to buy a
| 24TB Western Digital hard drive? It's $350. But if you and your
| 1000 closest friends get together the price can be $275.
|
| But for a first time unknown product? You get a lot fewer
| interested parties. Lots of people want to wait for tech
| reviews and blog posts before committing to it. And group buys
| being the only way to get them means availability will be
| inconsistent for the foreseeable future. I don't want one voice
| assistant. I want 5-20, one for every space in my house. But I
| am not prepared to commit to 20 devices of a first run and I am
| not prepared to buy one and hope I'll get the opportunity to
| buy more later if it doesn't flop. Stability of the supply
| chain is an important signal to consumers that the device won't
| be abandoned.
| bhaney wrote:
| > I am not prepared to buy one and hope I'll get the
| opportunity to buy more later
|
| As long as this thing works and there's demand for it, I
| doubt we'll ever run out of people willing to connect an
| XU316 and some mics to an ESP32-S3 and sell it to you with
| HA's open source firmware flashed to it, whether or not HA
| themselves are still willing to.
| Jarwain wrote:
| I agree! I mean, just look at the market for Meshtastic
| devices! So many options! Or devices with WLED pre-
| installed! It'll take a Lot for Esp32 to go out of style
| ascorbic wrote:
| Kickstarter shows that a lot of people feel different.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Kickstarter isn't a group buy. Similar, but not the same.
| esperent wrote:
| > But for a first time unknown product? You get a lot fewer
| interested parties. Lots of people want to wait for tech
| reviews and blog posts before committing to it.
|
| I used to think so too. But then Kickstarter proved that
| actually, as long as you have a good advertising style,
| communicate well, and get lucky, you can get people to
| contribute literal millions for a product that hasn't even
| reached the blueprints stage yet.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Kickstarter isn't a group buy.
| yunohn wrote:
| Kickstarter is often basically a group buy. Project
| owners make MVPs and market/pitch it, get funding from
| the public, and then commission a large batch run.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> I want 5-20, one for every space in my house.
|
| I don't have a small house, but I'm trying to think why I
| would need even 5 of these, let alone 20. The majority of the
| time my family spends together is in the open layout on our
| main floor where the kitchen flows into the living room with
| an adjacent sun room off the living room.
|
| I'm genuinely curious why you need so many of these.
|
| I do agree that if you do have a legit use case for so many,
| buying so many in essentially a first run is a risky thing.
| Coupled with the ability for this to be supported for more
| than a fleeting couple of years is also a huge risk.
| Jarwain wrote:
| Just using where I might want it in childhood home as an
| example - master bedroom - master bathroom - grandma's room
| - my room - brother's room - upstairs bathroom - upstairs
| loft? - office room - living room/diningroom -
| kitchen/kitchentable/familyroom - garage?
|
| 9-14 devices for a 5 person household. May be a stretch
| since I'm not sure if my grandma could even really use it.
| Bathroom's a stretch but I'm imagining being in the shower
| and wanting to note multiple showerthoughts
| interludead wrote:
| Your idea about group buys is really intriguing. I wonder if
| the community might organically set something like that up once
| there's enough interest
| choffee wrote:
| Not really sure what the benefit of group buy would be here.
| Nuba Casa, the company that supports the development of home
| assistant and developed this product, already has a few
| products they sell. They had this stocked all over the world
| for the announcement and it sold out. I assume they had already
| made a few thousand. They will get more stock now and it will
| sell just like the other things they make. Any profit from this
| will go back into development of Home Assistant.
| Jarwain wrote:
| Heh thus far I've been an excited spectator of HomeAssistant,
| and wasn't aware of Nuba Casa until doing research for a
| different comment on the thread. I do love and appreciate
| their model here
|
| I guess the benefits that came to mind are - alternative
| crowdsourced route for sourcing hardware, to avoid things
| like that raspberry pi shortage (although if it's due to
| broader supply chain issues then this doesn't necessarily
| help) - hardware forks! If someone wanted a version with a
| more powerful ESP32, or a GPS, or another mic, or an
| enclosure for a battery and charging and all that, took the
| time to fork the design to add these features, and found X
| other users interested in the fork to get it produced... (of
| course I might be betraying my ignorance on how easy it is to
| set up this sort of alternative manufacturing chain or what
| unit amounts are necessary to make this kind of forking
| economical)
| pimeys wrote:
| I'm also very excited. I've had some ESP32 microphones before,
| but they were not really able to understand the wake word,
| sometimes even when it was quiet and you were sitting next to
| the mic.
|
| This one looks like it can recognize your voice very well, even
| when music is playing.
|
| Because... when it works, it's amazing. You get that Star Trek
| wake word (KHUM-PUTER!), you can connect your favorite LLM to
| it (ChatGPT, Claude Sonnet, Ollama), you can control your home
| automation with it and it's as private as you want.
|
| I ordered two of these, if they are great, I will order two
| more. I've been waiting for this product for years, it's
| hopefully finally here.
| nine_k wrote:
| As a side note, it always slightly puzzles me when I see
| "voice interface" and "private" used together. Maybe it takes
| living alone to issue voice commands and feel some privacy.
|
| (Yes, I do understand that "privacy" here is mostly about not
| sending it for processing to third parties.)
| staunton wrote:
| > Yes, I do understand that "privacy" here is mostly about
| not sending it for processing to third parties.
|
| Then why does it puzzle you?
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Because you wouldn't ask it deeply private questions in
| front of your mom, for instance
| xandrius wrote:
| There are levels of privacy. Because I'm not going to ask
| deeply private questions, it doesn't mean that I want
| everyone to be snooping into what I'm planning to eat
| tonight.
| iteria wrote:
| I don't like these interaces because unless they are button
| activated or something, they must be always listening and
| sending sound from where you are to a 3rd party server. No
| thanks. Of course this could be happening with my phone,
| but at least it have to be a malicious action to record me
| 24/7
| pimeys wrote:
| How these ESP32-systems work is that you send a wake word
| to the device itself. It can detect the word without an
| internet connection, the device itself understands it and
| wakes up. After the device is woken up, it sends your
| speech to home assistant, which either -
| handles it locally, if you have fast enough computer
| - sends it to home assistant cloud, if you set it up
| - sends it to chatgpt, claude sonnet etc. if you set it
| up
|
| I'm planning on building a proxmox rack server next year,
| so I'm probably going to just handle all the discussions
| locally. The home assistant cloud is quite private too,
| at least that's what they say (and they're in EU, so I
| think there might be truth in what they say)...
| pimeys wrote:
| Private meaning that a big American corporation is not
| listening and using my voice to either track me or teach
| their own AI service with it.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Not super convinced the XMOS audio processing chip is really
| gonna buy a lot. Trying to do audio input processing feels like a
| dynamic task, requiring such adaption. XMOS is the most well
| known audio processor and a beast, but not sure it's really gonna
| help here!
|
| I really hope we see some open-source machine -learned systems
| emerge.
|
| I saw Insta360 announce their video conferencing solution today.
| Optics looks pretty medium, nothing wild, but Insta360 is so good
| at video that I expect it'll be great. But there's a huge 14
| microphone array on it, and that's the hard job; figuring out how
| to get good audio from speakers in a variety of locations around
| a room. It really made me wish for more open source footing here,
| some promising start, be it the conference room or open living
| space. I've given all of 60s to look through this, and was kinda
| hopeful because heck yeah Home Assistant, but my initial read
| isn't super promising, isn't that this is starting the proper
| software base needed to listen well to the world.
|
| https://petapixel.com/2024/12/17/the-insta360-connect-is-a-2...
| choffee wrote:
| They showed a video at the end of their broadcast last night
| comparing what the raw microphone hears and what comes out of
| the XMOS chip and you can hear a much clearer voice all the
| time even when there is noise or you are far away from the
| device. It is also used to cancel out the music if you are
| using it's speaker output. I don't think it's doing any voice
| processing but it's cleaning up the audio a lot which makes the
| job of the wake word processor and the speach to text a lot
| easier. Up until now this was missing from a lot of the home
| made voice assistance and I think why Alexa can understand you
| from the next room but my home made one struggles with all but
| quiet conditions.
| summm wrote:
| Alexa Echo Dot has 6 or 7 microphones. I'd expect that makes
| it much easier to filter out voices directionally than only
| the 2 microphone this hardware has. I hope they release a
| version with more microphones.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| And on back order everywhere. I just spent the last 2 weeks
| getting a esp32-s3-box setup to do this but its lack of audio out
| really irks me.
| joshstrange wrote:
| And the mic is not all that great either. I have a couple of
| them but they just weren't reliably picking up my voice and I
| couldn't hear the reply either (when it did hear me). I figured
| it would be easy to add a speaker to them but that sent me down
| a rabbit hole that I gave up on and put them in a drawer. I'll
| buy this for sure though because when the ESP32 box thing
| worked it worked really well and I loved being able to swap out
| parts of the assist pipeline.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I ended up moddng the s3 yaml to turn off the internal
| speaker and to forward all voice responses to a google hub.
| alias_neo wrote:
| To be fair, the issue with the Box-3 is HA's implementation;
| I used it with heywillow.io and it was incredible, I could
| speak to it from another room and it would pick up perfectly.
|
| The audio out is terrible so I wrote a shim-server that
| captures the request to the TTS server for heywillow and sent
| it to a speaker I build myself running MPD on a Pi with a
| nice DAC and have it play the responses instead of the
| box-3's tiny speaker.
|
| I don't expect the audio-out on this to be much better with
| its tiny speaker, but at least it has a 3.5mm jack.
|
| I'm going to look into what that Grove port can do too and
| perhaps build a new speaker "module" that the Voice PE can
| sit on top of to make it a proper music device.
| yzydserd wrote:
| > And on back order everywhere.
|
| I just clicked through to my large country and the first vendor
| and was able to buy 2 for delivery tomorrow. So it says. So
| maybe not on back order everywhere.
| sofixa wrote:
| If it's an ESP32-S3-BOX-3, there is audio out (assuming you
| mean being able to send arbitrary audio to it to play). Due to
| the framework used it's not available, but there's an
| alternative firmware available on GitHub that uses the newer
| framework and it exposes a media player entity you can send any
| audio to.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I didn't have the -3 version. Learned the hard way after
| loading up that alt framework last week and the screen went
| blank I did end up implementing that same solution on my
| hardware though.
| mkagenius wrote:
| Though a separate hardware helps - I believe voice and automation
| can be integrated more seamlessly to our existing devices
| (phones/laptops) with high compute built in.
|
| Llama and whisper are already public so that should help
| innovation in this area.
| antonyt wrote:
| With existing phones and laptops, there's either activation
| friction (pressing the "listen to me" button) or the device has
| to be always listening, which requires a lot of trust in your
| hardware vendors.
|
| With an open source and potentially local-only device, you can
| have your voice assistant and keep your privacy.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| last i checked open source whisper does not support streaming
| or diarization out of the box. you really need both for a good
| voice assistant experience
| joshstrange wrote:
| You can use your phone to text or talk to HA's assistant. I've
| done that a number of times when Alexa fails. Having dedicated
| hardware is a huge step up for me. I've tried their ESP32 mini
| cube assistant thing before and it showed a lot of promise but
| the hardware (speaker and mic, processor was fine) was lacking.
| This seems to be a good mic and speaker wrapped around a
| similar core so I'm super excited for it.
| alias_neo wrote:
| The voice input can really be done however you like, the
| benefit of a device like the Voice PE is the wake word
| detection on-device.
|
| I have an office-style desk-phone (SNOM) connected to a SIP
| server and I can pick the receiver up and talk to the
| Assistant, but you can plug in any way you like to get the
| audio to/from HA.
|
| With your phone, wake words are usually locked down by
| Apple/Google so you can't really have it hands-free, and that's
| the problem this device is solving; not the audio input itself,
| but the wake-word/handfree input.
|
| On an Android phone, you can replace the Google Assistant with
| the Home Assistant one, but you still have to activate it the
| usual way, press a button or launch the app etc.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Home Assistant is such a fantastic project. I've been waiting for
| something like this for a long time; I just pre-ordered three.
|
| My only remaining wish is that I can replace Siri with this
| (without needing some workaround)
| hoppp wrote:
| If it runs fully on premise that would be great. Im still not
| comfortable buying a device that records everything I say and
| uploads it to a cloud
| haddonist wrote:
| Fully on-prem can be done if you've got the LLM compute power
| in place.
| catmanjan wrote:
| All I want is a voice assistant that I can call "computer" like
| Star Trek, I don't want to have to say a brand name thankyou!
| dartos wrote:
| You could've always set Alexa to respond to "Computer" instead.
| catmanjan wrote:
| Ah I admit I haven't looked into it for several years, good
| to see they added the feature - I might have to grab one
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| The problem is that it will go off every single time you
| watch Star Trek.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Can confirm, this works fabulously!
| antonyt wrote:
| If you run openWakeWord, "computer" is one of very many
| pretrained models the community has made:
| https://github.com/fwartner/home-assistant-wakewords-collect...
| lxe wrote:
| Here's what I'm looking for in a voice assistant:
|
| - Full privacy: nothing goes to the "cloud"
|
| - Non-shitty microphones and processing: i want to be able to be
| heard without having to yell, repeat, or correct
|
| - No wake words: it should listen to everything, process it, and
| understand when it's being addressed. Since everything is private
| and local, this is now doable
|
| - Conversational: it should understand when I finished talking,
| have ability to be interrupted, all with low latency
|
| - Non-stupid: it's 2024, and alexa and siri and google are
| somehow absolutely abysmal at doing even the basics
|
| - Complete: i don't want to use an app to get stuff configured. I
| want everything to be controlled via voice
| danparsonson wrote:
| > No wake words: it should listen to everything, process it,
| and understand when it's being addressed
|
| Even humans struggle with this one - that's what names are for!
| antonyt wrote:
| Yeah, I'm having a hard time imagining how no-wake-word could
| work in practice.
| fragmede wrote:
| after setting up the system, if I say "turn the ceiling
| lights to 20%", who else would be changing the lights?
|
| But also, post-fix wake word would also be natural if it
| was recording all the time. "turn on the lights, Google",
| for instance
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Someone in a TV show that you're watching?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Like that really annoying friend who jumps in every other
| sentence with "Well actually..."
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I have a coworker that set up an Alexa an year or so ago,
| I don't know what was the issue, but it would jump into
| Teams meetings after every noise in his house.
| lukifer wrote:
| This is one advantage of a system with a constrained set of
| commands/grammars, as opposed to the Alexa/Siri model of
| trying to process all arbitrary text while in active mode.
| It can simply ignore/discard any invocations which don't
| match those specific grammars (and no need to wait to
| confirm that the device is awake).
|
| "Computer, turn lights to 50%" -> "turn lights to fifty
| percent" -> {action: "lights", value: 50}
|
| "My new computer has a really beefy graphics card" -> "has
| a really beefy graphics card" -> {action: null}
| wild_egg wrote:
| How much are you willing to pay though? Full privacy means
| powerful enough hardware to do everything else on the list on-
| device and _quickly_. I don't know that most people have the
| budget for that
| nissarup wrote:
| Looks like you are in the market for a butler.
|
| Especially your last point will, IMO, not be possible for a
| long time.
| Lanolderen wrote:
| I'd imagine with 1-2 TVs constantly talking, general
| conversations and other random noises it'd get expensive quick.
| Definitely closer to a rack than a RaspPi or old laptop
| hardware wise. Also add to that more/better mics for coverage
| and the complexity of it guessing when you're asking _it_ to
| remind you to buy toothpaste or your SO... It can probably be
| done by tracking who 's home, who's in the room with the
| speaker, who the speaker is, etc but it's all cost..
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| without a wake word that's a lot of compute unless you live
| alone and don't watch tv or listen to music
|
| they even used a wake word in star trek fwiw
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Can someone describe the use case here? I don't quite understand
| what its purpose is.
|
| Is this a fully-private, open source alternative to Alexa, that
| by definition requires a CPU locally to run ?
|
| Is the device supposed to be the nerve center of IoT devices ?
|
| Can it access the Wifi to do web crawls on command (music,
| google, etc)?
| IvyMike wrote:
| If you have home automation, surely you've run into this
| situation when Comcast flakes (or similar):
|
| "OK, Google, turn lights on" "Check your connection and try
| again"
|
| As far as I can tell, if you have Home Assistant + this new
| device, you've fixed that problem.
| antonyt wrote:
| The nerve center would be your Home Assistant instance, which
| is not this device. You can run Home Assistant on whatever
| hardware you like, including options sold by Nabu Casa.
|
| This device provides the microphone, speaker, and WiFi to do
| wake-word detection, capture your input, send it off to your HA
| instance, and reply to you with HA's processed response.
| Whether your HA instance phones out to the internet to produce
| the response is up to you and how you've configured it.
| jve wrote:
| While we are getting shoveled AI keyword everywhere, I'm actually
| disappointed I don't see it here.
|
| The first thought I had when encountering LLM was that it can
| finally make these devices understand you and make them finally
| useful... and I don't need to know some presceipted keywords.
| antonyt wrote:
| You can actually integrate LLMs with Assist pipelines, it's
| just orthogonal to this hardware announcement. Check out
| https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/06/05/release-20246/...
| pimeys wrote:
| It's also really cool. You can make it so that the home
| assistant itself first tries to understand what you do, like
| turning on the living room lights or setting the bathroom
| temperature to 21.5 degrees celsius. If the assistant
| pipeline does not understand what you are asking for, it can
| send your question to the LLM of your choice. You can also
| make the LLM to control the lights, heat etc, but at least
| for now ChatGPT is pretty bad with that. So let home
| assistant do the home automation, and then let ChatGPT to
| answer your questions about the most popular ruler in the
| 19th century France.
| joshstrange wrote:
| It's too bad it's sold out everywhere. I've tried the ESP32
| projects (little cube guy) for voice assistants in HA but it's
| mic/speaker weren't good enough. When it did hear me (and I heard
| it) it did an amazing job. For the first time I talked to a voice
| assistant that understood "Turn off office lights" to mean "Turn
| off all the lights in the office" without me giving it any
| special grouping (like I have to do in Alexa and then it randomly
| breaks). It handled a ton of requests that are easy for any human
| but Alexa/Siri trip up on.
|
| I cannot wait to buy 5 or more of these to replace Alexa. HA is
| the brain of my house and up till now Alexa provided the best
| hardware to interact with HA (IMHO) but I'd love something first-
| party.
| bdavbdav wrote:
| How did you find it for music tasks?
| joshstrange wrote:
| I didn't test that. I normally just manually play through my
| Sonos speaker groups on my phone. I don't like the sound from
| the Echos so I'm not in the habit of asking them to do
| anything related to music.
|
| Right now I only use Alexa for smart house control and
| setting timers
| moffkalast wrote:
| I'm definitely buying one for robotics, having a dedicated unit
| for both STT and TTS that actually works and integrates well
| would make a lot of social robots more usable and far easier to
| set up and maintain. Hopefully there's a ROS driver for it
| eventually too.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| As someone not that familiar with haas, can someone explain why
| there's not a clear path to replace Alexa or Google home? I
| considered using haas recently to get a gpt like response after
| being frustrated with Google home, but it seems this is a
| complete mess. is there a way to get this yet?
| joshstrange wrote:
| > explain why there's not a clear path to replace Alexa or
| Google home?
|
| There is. I've used HA with their default assist pipeline
| (Cloud HA STT, Cloud HA LLM, Cloud HA TTS) and I've also
| plugged in different providers at each step (both remote and
| local for each part: STT/LLM/TTS) and it's super cool. Their
| default LLM isn't great but it works, plugging in OpenAI made
| it work way better. My local models weren't great in speed but
| I don't have hardware dedicated for this purpose (currently),
| seeing an entire local pipeline was amazing for the promise of
| it in the future. It's too slow (on my hardware) but we are so
| close to local models (SST/TTS could be improved as well but
| they are much easier to do already locally).
|
| If this new HA hardware comes even close to performing as well
| as the Echo's in my house (low bar) I'll replace them all.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| What does it use LLMs for?
| joshstrange wrote:
| Taking the text of what you said and figuring out what you
| want to do. It sends what you said plus a list of
| devices/states and a list of functions (to turn off/on, set
| temp, etc of devices). The LLM takes "Turn off basement
| lights" and turns that into "{function: "call_service",
| args: ['lights.on', 'entity-id-123']}" (<- Completely made
| up but it's something like that) that it passes back to HA
| along with what to say back to the user ("Lights turned
| off" or whatever) and HA will run the function and then do
| TTS to respond to you.
| tomqueue wrote:
| I am very excited for this. One question I couldn't find an
| answer for though is whether the hardware is open enough to be
| usable with other home automation systems. I am using OpenHAB and
| they too have an integrated voice assistant. I looked into
| migrating to HA a couple times but eventually gave up, primarily
| because it felt like such a waste of time to migrate a fully
| working environment with dozens of rules and scripts to yaml
| files.
| interludead wrote:
| Moving a fully functional setup with complex rules and scripts
| is a daunting task
| choffee wrote:
| It's all open and so should be able to work with OpenHAB as
| well but it would need somebody to either write a firmware
| that's compatibale with the OpenHAB endpoints or add ESPHome
| interegeation into OpenHAB. Somebody might have already done
| that for their voice stuff. There is not much yaml in home
| assistant now unless you want it. I'd give it a go in a VM and
| see what it finds on your network :)
| interludead wrote:
| I think in some ways it could redefine how we think about voice
| control... taking it from the cloud and putting it back into
| users' hands, like literally
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| A good emphasis in the summary, that certain other companies will
| only focus on monetization at the expense of features and
| functionality.
| delijati wrote:
| Perfect will dig more into it. Currently i like to have an
| spotify client without ui for my kids ;)
| ahaucnx wrote:
| It's not clear to me from the description if this is also
| completely open source hardware. Are the schematics, BoM,
| firmware published under a permissible license? If so, where are
| they accessible?
|
| And if not, I would be curious to know why it haven't been fully
| open sourced.
| choffee wrote:
| I would think so in the end. They talked about the case design
| being open. The software and firmware are all open already and
| they said that they really wanted people to be able to take
| these components and make new devices.
|
| They have relesased the designs for the yellow so I assume it
| will all come. https://github.com/NabuCasa/yellow
| fx1994 wrote:
| What I don't like is that most voice assistances perform really
| bad on my native language so I don't use them at all. For english
| speakers yes, but for all other not so much. I guess it will get
| better.
| choffee wrote:
| That is one of the major things that Home Assistant are trying
| to fix. They have groups working on most languages and are
| adding them to their open as they improve. https://www.home-
| assistant.io/voice_control/contribute-voice
| leeoniya wrote:
| anyone tried https://getleon.ai/ ?
| lukifer wrote:
| I tried years ago, I don't think I got it working, ended up
| using Rhasspy/voice2json instead (TIL: the creator of both is
| now the Voice Eng Lead for Home Assistant).
|
| Looks like the GitHub is still somewhat active, although their
| roadmap links to a dead Trello: https://github.com/leon-ai/leon
| solarkraft wrote:
| RIP Mycroft. A tad too early.
| choffee wrote:
| Nabu Casa employ one of the Mycroft devs now and i think some
| of the tech came from that project so it's not all gone :)
| singularity2001 wrote:
| sorry if this question takes away from the great strives the team
| went through but wouldn't it be much easier (hardware wise) to
| jailbreak one of the existing great hardware thingies like Apple
| HomePod or the Google one or Alexa?
| choffee wrote:
| I don't think they are that easy to jail break but I may be
| wrong. I think they wanted to create an open device that people
| could build from rather than just a hacked up alexa.
| robotfelix wrote:
| I've picked up an Echo Dot a few years ago when Amazon were
| practically giving them away, thinking that surely someone
| would have jailbroken it by now to allow it to be used with
| Home Assistant.
|
| It was only after researching later that I discovered that this
| wasn't currently possible and recommended approach was to buy
| some replacement internals that cost more than the device
| itself (and if I recall correctly, more than the new Home
| Assistant Voice Preview Edition).
| alias_neo wrote:
| The fact that it hasn't (widely?) been done yet suggests the
| answer is "no".
|
| The hardware in those devices is generally better, most of them
| have much better speakers, but they're locked down, the wake-
| word detection hardware isn't open or accessible so changing it
| to do what we need would be difficult, and you're just hoping
| there's a way in.
|
| Existing examples of opening them (as in freedom) replace the
| PCB entirely, which puts you back to square one of needing open
| hardware.
|
| This feels like the right approach to me; I've been building my
| own devices for this purpose with off-the-shelf parts, and
| designing enclosures, but this is much sleeker; I just hope an
| add-on or future version comes with much better audio out
| (speakers) because that's where it and things like it (e.g. the
| S3-Box-3) are really lacking.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| or maybe find cheap Chinese smart speaker which is hackable?
| Havoc wrote:
| Had to laugh a bit at the caveat about powerful hardware. Was
| bracing myself for GPU and then it says N100 lol
| moooo99 wrote:
| I mean, comparatively many people are hosting their home
| Assistant on an raspberry Pi so it is relatively powerful :D
| geerlingguy wrote:
| And the CM5 is nearly equivalent in terms of the small models
| you run. Latency is nearly the same, though you can get a
| little more fancy if you have an N100 system with more RAM,
| and "unlocked" thermals (many N100 systems cap the power draw
| because they don't have the thermal capacity to run the chip
| at max turbo).
| moffkalast wrote:
| If we're being fair you can more like, walk models, not run
| them :)
|
| An 125H box may be three times the price of an N100 box,
| but the power draw is about the same (6W idle, 28W max,
| with turbo off anyway) and with the Arc iGPU the prompt
| processing is in the hundreds, so near instant replies to
| longer queries are doable.
| fons wrote:
| I wonder how this compares to the Respeaker 2
| https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/ReSpeaker_Mic_Array_v2.0/
|
| The respeaker has 4 mics and can easily cancel out the noise
| introduced by a custom external speaker
| stavros wrote:
| I don't just want the hardware, I want the software too. I want
| something that will do STT on my speech, send the text to an
| API endpoint I control, and be able to either speak the text I
| give it, or live stream an audio response to the speakers.
|
| That's the part I can't do on my own, and then I'll take care
| of the LLMs myself.
| alias_neo wrote:
| All of these components are available separately or as add-
| ons for Home Assistant.
|
| I currently do STT with heywillow[0] and an S3-Box-3 which
| uses an LLM running on a server I have to do incredibly fast,
| incredibly accurate STT. It uses Coqui XTTS for TTS, with
| very high quality LLM based voice; you can also clone a voice
| by supplying it with a few seconds of audio (I tested cloning
| my own with frightening results).
|
| Playback to a decent speaker can be done in a bunch of ways;
| I wrote a shim that captures the TTS request to Coqui and
| forwards it to a Pi based speaker I built, running MPD which
| then requests the audio from the STT server (Coqui) and plays
| it back on my higher quality speaker than the crappy ones
| built in to the voice-input devices.
|
| If you just want to use what's available HA, there's all of
| the Wyoming stuff, openWakeword (not necessary if you're
| using this new Voice PE because it does on-device wakeword),
| Piper for TTS, or MaryTTS (or others) and Whisper (faster-
| whisper) for STT, or hook in something else you want to use.
| You can additionally use the Ollama integration to hook it
| into an Ollama model running on higher end hardware for
| proper LLM based reasoning.
|
| [0]heywillow.io
| stavros wrote:
| I do the same, Willow has been unmaintained for close to a
| year, and calling it "incredibly fast" and "incredibly
| accurate" tells me that we have very different experiences.
| alias_neo wrote:
| It's a shame it's been getting no updates, I noticed
| that, but their secret sauce is all open stuff anyway so
| just replace them with the upstream components; their
| box-3 firmware and the application server is really the
| bit they built (as well as the "correction" service).
|
| If it wasn't fast or accurate for you, what were you
| running it on? I'm using the large model on a Tesla GPU
| in a Ryzen 9 server, using the XTTS-2 (Coqui) branch.
|
| The thing about ML based STT/TTS and the
| reasoning/processing is that you get better performance
| the more hardware you throw at it; I'm using nearly PS4k
| worth of hardware to do it; is it worth it? No, is it
| reasonable? Also no, but I already had the hardware and
| it's doing other things.
|
| I'll switch over to Assist and run Ollama instead now
| there's some better hardware with on-device wake-word
| from Nabu.
| robotfelix wrote:
| It's worth noting that product is listed in the "Discontinued
| Products" section of the linked wiki.
|
| Both of the ReSpeaker products in the non-discontinued section
| (ReSpeaker Lite, ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT) have only 2 mics, so
| it appears that things are converging in that direction.
| alias_neo wrote:
| The S3-Box-3 also only has two mics, and I found I can talk
| to that from another room of the house and it detects what I
| said perfectly fine.
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| https://linuxvoice.ai
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| I had great trouble simply connecting Bluetooth speaker to use it
| as voice input and for sound output. The overall state of sound
| subsystem for diy voice assistant feels third-class at best.
| albybisy wrote:
| i don't wanna talk to a computer
| cheema33 wrote:
| > i don't wanna talk to a computer
|
| You are in luck. You can get a human butler. But not for $59.
| bsdice wrote:
| Majel Barrett voice please.
| ragmondo wrote:
| My plea / request : Make a home assistant a DROP IN replacement
| for a standard light switch. It has power, its adds functionality
| from the get-go (smart lighting), it's placed in a convenient
| position for the room and no extra wires etc required.
| Carrok wrote:
| Look at Shelly light switches.
| NegativeK wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| They sell UL rated models, have an option for cloud
| connectivity but zero requirement, your switch still works if
| the Shelly loses connectivity with whatever home automation
| server you have, and it's a small box that you wire in behind
| the switch.
| Carrok wrote:
| They also make drop in replacement dimmer switches. Even
| easier than the small box style.
| https://us.shelly.com/products/shelly-plus-wall-dimmer
| timdiggerm wrote:
| You've misunderstood what they're asking for. They're asking
| for Home Assistant hardware (microphone, speaker, wifi) that,
| instead of being a standalone box taking up space on the
| counter/table/etc, fits into the hole in the hall where they
| currently have a lightswitch.
| Carrok wrote:
| I guess I did misunderstand, because that request seems
| strange to me. I'm assuming they have more than one switch.
| Which one should have Home Assistant on it? Seems like an
| odd deployment strategy. A pi isn't that big..
| hn92726819 wrote:
| No I don't think that's it either. Home assistant runs on
| a server somewhere still.
|
| What the top level comment is asking for, completely
| unrelated to the article mind you, is to have a smart
| device in the form factor of a light switch that you can
| hook into your home assistant system.
|
| The problem they likely have (I have it too) is that you
| set HA up and it can control smart plugs, smart
| thermostats, etc, but it can't control 99% of the
| existing lights in your house because they are wired to
| dumb lightswitches. Instead of some mechanical finger
| flicking a switch or something, why not uninstall the
| existing light switch and replace it with a smart one.
| Carrok wrote:
| So my original comment was not a misunderstanding. They
| are smart switch drop in replacements.
| hn92726819 wrote:
| Yeah, you're right. That is a weird request then, or I
| don't understand it either. I didn't realize something
| like [1] goes _inside_ your switch. I was expecting a
| switch with a faceplate combined.
|
| 1: https://us.shelly.com/products/shelly-1-gen3
| Carrok wrote:
| They also make what you're describing.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Not the home assistant controller, but a peripheral. A
| light switch you can toggle manually or through the
| assistant.
|
| I think the problem with this setup is that it needs to
| be wifi connected, and if you embed an esp32 inside a
| wall it will get exactly zero signal. Maybe with external
| antennas hidden in the switch outer case.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| ? I have my house packed to the brim with tplink Wi-Fi
| smart switches, they work fine.
|
| https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/smart-switch/
| moffkalast wrote:
| Ah right I forget I'm talking to Americans on an American
| site, who all have walls made out of wood and gypsum. Try
| that with brick and steel reinforced concrete lol.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| :)
| Carrok wrote:
| The switches I linked are esp32. They live inside the
| wall. They get great signal.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Not OP but if I have to have a CPU and microphone for
| voice commands anyway it doesn't sound crazy to throw a
| whole pi/relay node into every room of the house that I
| want to have control of. Pi zero 2 is fifteen bucks and
| can run Whisper speech2text iirc, throw ChatScript on
| there for local command decoding and call it a day. I
| think I'd pay 50 to 100 per room for the convenience,
| paying a premium to not have my voice surveilled by Alexa
| just to set timers.
| ragmondo wrote:
| Without trying to digress, but why not make it modular
| too ? I.e. base model is a smart switch, one unit is the
| "base" unit and the rest talk to that. Possibly even add
| further switches, dials (thermostat or dimmer etc).
| Perfect placement in my opinion.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Suppose I have a bias for meshnet vs hub and spoke. Seems
| to me having full power cpu on every mic is going to be
| better experience latency and glitchwise than streaming
| audio feeds around. Of course they would still talk to
| each other to pass commands around.
| ragmondo wrote:
| Yes - exactly this. If there are multiple needed, then some
| can be smarter/ more capable than others, but this removes
| the "just another box and cable(s)" issue.
| throwaway4220 wrote:
| Would a zigbee or z wave switch fit your needs? It's "offline"
| but does need a hub
| sirtaj wrote:
| The now 8-year-old blog post titled "Perfect Home
| Automation"[1] on the HA website agrees with you from the first
| heading, and is borne out by my personal experience too. Nobody
| in your house should need to retrain to do things they are
| already doing.
|
| 1. https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-
| home-a...
| bradly wrote:
| Are there any MacOS software versions of this? I've been looking
| for opensource wake-work for a "Hey Siri"-like integration, but
| I'm very apprehensive of anything, malicious or not, monitoring
| the sound input for a specific word in an efficient way.
| silentOpen wrote:
| OpenWakeWord has worked well for me especially using well-
| trained models like "Hey, Mycroft".
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Well shoot. Now i want to record everything in my house and
| transcribe it for logs. I already wanted to do that but didn't
| think there was a sane way.. assuming this lets me create a
| custom pipeline, that's wicked
| dboreham wrote:
| It isn't even one year since the press stories about how dumb a
| product Alexa was and how it makes no money and all the devs are
| getting laid off. Something changed now?
| eightysixfour wrote:
| It was a bad product at making money for Amazon, but they are
| useful for smart homes. Home Assistant is pretty squarely in
| the smart home category.
|
| I bought two the second they were announced, I already use the
| software stack with the m5 atoms and they are terrible devices,
| but the software works well enough for me.
| iamjackg wrote:
| Well, the various Echo devices were allegedly built as loss
| leaders in the hope people would use them to make orders on
| Amazon. This is backed by the most active open source project
| on GitHub, which already has extensive support for voice
| pipelines both with and without LLMs, and is likely priced
| sensibly.
|
| A lot has changed in the open source ecosystem since commercial
| assistants were first launched. We have reliable open source
| wakeword detectors, and cheap/free LLMs can do the intent
| parsing, response generation, and even action calling.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Huh? Being able to do things like turn off lights or change the
| TV volume with your voice is actually quite a nice convenience
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If it's not clear, the Home Assistant business plan is
| different from the Amazon one for Alexa... and the Home
| Assistant open source project is even more different.
| sirtaj wrote:
| I've been using the HA cloud voice assistant on my phone for
| the past few weeks, and it's such a great change from Alexa,
| because integrating new services and adding sentences is
| actually possible.
|
| Alexa, on the other hand, won't even allow a third party app to
| read its shopping list. It's no longer clear to me why Alexa
| even exists any more except as a kitchen timer.
| baq wrote:
| They _must_ be working on a LLM backend for it so it isn 't
| dumb as a rock.
|
| Nothing makes sense otherwise, agreed.
| jmuguy wrote:
| Amazon lost 25 billion dollars on Alexa (between 2017 and 2021,
| from WSJ https://archive.is/uMTOB). Selling the hardware at a
| loss and I imagine a bigger portion was the thousands of people
| they had working in that division.
|
| So yeah, Alexa is a dumb product... for Amazon. No one uses
| Alexa to buy anything from Amazon because the only way you can
| be sure of what you're ordering from Amazon is to be looking at
| the site. Otherwise you might get cat food from "JOYFUNG BEST
| Brand 2024" and not Purina.
|
| Voice Assistants for Home Automation, like what Home Assistant
| is offering, are awesome. And this in particular is exciting
| exactly because of Alexa's failure as a product. Amazon clearly
| does not care about Alexa now, its been getting worse as they
| try to shoehorn in more and more monetization strategies.
| causal wrote:
| > "We worried we've hired 10,000 people and we've built a
| smart timer," said a former senior employee.
|
| How the hell did Amazon hire that many people to develop such
| low-tech devices.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > the only way you can be sure of what you're ordering from
| Amazon is to be looking at the site
|
| Ah . . . an optimist!
| nailer wrote:
| You should talk to Sonos about partnering with them. They
| currently have a very limited Sonos voice assist, plus Google
| Voice and Alexa, but the latter two are limited pre-LLM
| assistants.
|
| I'm assuming they eventually want to create their own LLM and
| something privacy focused would be good match for their
| customers. I don't know how they feel about open source though
| skyde wrote:
| how does this compare to ESP32-S3-BOX-3B ?
| sreejithr wrote:
| Genuine question - How hackable is this? Can I have the voice
| commands redirected to my backend server where I can process it
| as I please?
| balloob wrote:
| This is Home Assistant. Everything is hackable.
|
| Inside Home Assistant the processing is delegated to
| integrations providing Speech-to-Text, command processing,
| Text-to-Speech. You can make custom integrations for all of
| them
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| It's fully open-source. I think the default use-case is to have
| the voice commands processed locally
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Probably as much as any other smart speaker without having to
| give your data away.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Is anyone aware of an effort to repurpose Echo hardware to do HA
| voice?
| drdaeman wrote:
| I've looked into this, and found nothing. One can surely
| repurpose the case and speakers, but the microphones are
| soldered on-board, and the board is not hackable and needs to
| go. To best of my awareness, there are no ways to load a custom
| firmware on a newer Echo device - they're locked down pretty
| tight.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Looks great! The biggest issue I see is music. 90% of my use is
| "play some music" but none of the major streaming music providers
| offer APIs for obvious reasons. I'm not sure how you can get
| around that really.
| antonyt wrote:
| To do this in Home Assistant, you'd probably want to run Music
| Assistant and integrate it in. Looks like they manage to
| support some streaming providers, not entirely sure how:
| https://music-assistant.io/music-providers/
|
| Getting it to play the right thing from voice commands is a bit
| of a rabbit hole: https://music-assistant.io/integration/voice/
| steelframe wrote:
| If it's possible for the hardware to facilitate a use case, the
| employees working on the product will try to push the limits as
| far as they possibly can in order to manufacture interesting and
| challenging problems that will get them higher performance
| ratings and promotions. They will rationalize away privacy
| violations by appealing to their "good intentions" and their
| amazing ability to protect information from nefarious actors. In
| their minds they are working for "the good guys" who will surely
| "do the right thing."
|
| At various times in the past, the teams involved in such projects
| have at least prototyped extremely invasive features with those
| in-home devices. For example, one engineer I've visited with from
| a well-known in-home device manufacturer worked on classifiers
| that could distinguish between two people having sex and one
| person attacking another in audio captured passively by the
| microphones.
|
| As the corporate culture and leadership shifts over time I have
| marginal confidence that these prototypes will perpetually remain
| undeveloped or on-device only. Apple, for instance, has decided
| to send a significant amount of personal data to their "Private
| Cloud" and is taking the tactic of opening "enough" if its
| infrastructure for third-party audit to make an argument that the
| data they collect will only be used in a way that the user is
| aware and approves of. Maybe Apple can get something like that to
| a good enough state, at least for a time. However, they're
| inevitably normalizing the practice. I wonder how many
| competitors will be as equally disciplined in their
| implementations.
|
| So my takeaway is this: If there exists a pathway between a
| microphone and the Internet that you are not in 100% control
| over, it's not at all unreasonable to expect that anything and
| everything that microphone picks up at any time will be captured
| and stored by someone else. What happens with that audio will --
| in general -- be kept out of your knowledge and control so long
| as there is insufficient regulatory oversight.
| comradesmith wrote:
| Open source
| gh02t wrote:
| Yeah, OP is comparing this to Google/Amazon/Apple/etc devices
| but this is being developed by the nonprofit that manages
| development on Home Assistant and in cooperation with their
| large community of users. It's a _very_ different attitude
| driving development of voice remotes for Home Assistant vs.
| large corporations. They 've been around for a while now and
| have a proven track record of being actual, serious advocates
| for data privacy and user autonomy. Maybe they won't be
| forever, but then this thing is open source.
|
| The whole point is that you control what these things do, and
| that you can run these things fully locally if you want with
| no internet access, and run your own custom software on them
| if that's what you want to do. This is a product for the Home
| Assistant community that will probably never turn much of a
| profit, nor do I expect it is intended to.
| gigel82 wrote:
| What is a good GPU to put in a home server that can run the TTS /
| STT and the local LLM required to make this shine?
|
| A 3090 is too expensive and power hungry. Maybe a 3060 12Gb? Is
| there anything in the "workstation" lineup that is more efficient
| especially since I don't need the video outs?
| afh1 wrote:
| My experience with home assistance voice pipeline is nothing
| works and stt is terrible. I'll have to wait and see the reviews.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| My wife and I have been very happy with Home Assistant so far.
| The one thing we're missing is voice control, and until now it
| seemed like there just wasn't a clean solution for HA voice
| control. You were stuck doing some hobbyist shenanigans and hand-
| writing boatloads of YAML, or you were hooking up a HomeKit/Alexa
| which defeats the purpose of HA. This is a game-changer.
|
| They recommend an N100 in the blog post, but I might buy one
| anyway to see if my HA box's Celeron J3455 will do the job.
| Animats wrote:
| Nice. A totally local voice assistant.
|
| This makes sense for cars, where there's much local stuff to
| control. But for a home unit, what do you want to do that is
| entirely local? Turning the heat up and down gets boring after a
| while. If it does entertainment selection or shopping, it needs
| outside world connections.
|
| (Today's rant: I recently purchased a humidifier. It's just a
| little unit with a water tank, a water-softening filter, and an
| ultrasonic vaporizer. That part works fine. Then there are the
| controls.
|
| All this thing really needs is an on-off switch and a humidity
| knob, and maybe lights for power, humidification, and water tank
| empty. But no. It has five touch buttons and a round display
| about four inches across. The display is on even if the unit is
| off. Pressing the on/off button turns it on. If it's humidifying,
| there's a whole light show. The tank lights up purple. Swooping
| arcs of blue run up both edges of the round display. It's very
| impressive, especially in a dark bedroom. If you press and hold
| the second button for two seconds, about half the light show is
| suppressed.
|
| There are three fan speeds, and a button for that. Only the
| highest one will propel the water vapor high enough to avoid it
| hitting the floor and uselessly condensing before it mixes with
| the air. So that feature was not necessary.
|
| The display shows one number. It's usually the current humidity,
| but if you press the humidity set button, the number displayed
| becomes the setting, which is changed upwards by successive
| presses until it wraps around. After a few seconds, the display
| reverts to current humidity.
|
| Turning the unit off or removing the water tank resets all
| settings to the default.
|
| This is the low-end unit. The next step up comes with an IR
| remote. It's one way - the remote has buttons but no display.
| Since you have to be close to the display to use the buttons
| effectively, that doesn't help much. The step up after that is,
| inevitably, a cloud-based phone app.
|
| So this thing could potentially be interfaced to a voice
| assistant. That's only useful if there's enough information
| coming back from the device that the assistant software knows
| what the device is doing, and the assistant software understands
| that device status. If all it does is send remote button pushes,
| the result will be frustration.
|
| So you need some degree of intelligence at both ends - the end
| that talks to the human, and the end that talks to the device. If
| the user says "House, it's too dry in here", the assistant system
| needs to be able to check the status of the humidifier. Has
| power? Talking? On? Humidity setting reasonable? Fan running?
| Tank not empty? If it can't do that, it's part of the problem,
| not part of the solution.)
| meragrin_ wrote:
| > what do you want to do that is entirely local?
|
| Keeping my daily life from becoming public? These companies
| can't be trusted with the information they have. Why should I
| give them more that they can leak?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Self hosted isn't always local only. I have a vpn server on my
| home router and control my home assistant worldwide. No
| corporation controls my access or data.
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