[HN Gopher] My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hoste...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice
       assistant (2025)
        
       Author : Vaslo
       Score  : 290 points
       Date   : 2026-03-16 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (community.home-assistant.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (community.home-assistant.io)
        
       | dewey wrote:
       | Their first version is most likely already 10x better than Siri.
       | 
       | > Understands when it is in a particular area and does not ask
       | "which light?" when there is only one light in the area, but does
       | correctly ask when there are multiple of the device type in the
       | given area.
        
         | alex_young wrote:
         | One of my favorite episodes:
         | 
         | I set 2 timers for the same thing somehow. I then tried to
         | cancel one of them.                 >"Siri, cancel the second
         | timer"       "You have 2 timers running, would you like me to
         | cancel one of them?"       >"Yes"       "Yes is an English rock
         | band from the 70s..."       >"Siri, please cancel the timer
         | with 2 minutes and 10 seconds on it"       "Would you like me
         | to cancel the timer with 2 minutes and 8 seconds on it?"
         | >"Yes"       "Yes is an English rock band from the 70s..."
         | 
         | Eventually they both rang and she listened when I said stop.
        
           | 0_____0 wrote:
           | > "Stop" is a song by English girl group the Spice Girls from
           | their second studio album, Spiceworld (1997).
        
           | abroadwin wrote:
           | My favorite is when I ask Siri to set a timer and get back
           | "there are no timers running."
        
             | Skidaddle wrote:
             | My other favorite is when I ask Siri to set a timer on my
             | watch and it does a web search.
        
               | sanswork wrote:
               | My favourite is when I ask siri to stop the alarm(that is
               | currently going off) and it decides to disable my morning
               | wake up alarm but keep the current alarm going off.
        
             | jazzyjackson wrote:
             | "Siri stop"
             | 
             | "There's nothing to stop"
             | 
             | > me, suddenly aware of how the AI takeover will happen
        
           | xp84 wrote:
           | Helping my kid get ready for shower I had this exchange:
           | 
           | Me: "Text Jane Would you mind dropping down the robe and
           | underpants"
           | 
           | Siri: Sends Jane "Would you mind dropping down"
           | 
           | Me: _rolls eyes_ "Text Jane robe and underpants"
           | 
           | Siri: "I don't see a Jane Robe in your contacts."
           | 
           | Me: _wishes I could drown Siri in the bathtub_
           | 
           | It's wild to me that Apple got the ability to do the actual
           | speech-to-text part pretty much 100% solved more than half a
           | decade ago, yet struggles in 2026 to turn streams of very
           | simple, correctly-transcribed text into intents in ways that
           | even a local model can figure out. Siri is good STT, a bunch
           | of serviceable APIs that can control lots of stuff, with the
           | digital equivalent of a brain-damaged cat sitting at the
           | center of it guaranteeing the worst possible experience.
        
           | ted_dunning wrote:
           | At that point I would be very impressed if you could remember
           | what the timers are for.
        
         | phatskat wrote:
         | It's wild how many of you have issues with Siri - and to be
         | clear I'm not here to discount those issues, and I very much
         | believe all of the anecdotes here.
         | 
         | For me, Siri on either phone or watch is pretty much perfect -
         | I don't ask for much, mostly timers or making reminders.
         | 
         | Google's Nest Minis though? "Lights on" has a 50/50 shot of
         | being a song of the same name, or similar name, or totally
         | unrelated name. Same for "lights off". If I don't annunciate
         | "play rain sounds" clearly enough I get an album called "Rain
         | Songs" that is very much NOT calming for bed time. It doesn't
         | help that none of these understand that if I whisper a command,
         | it should respond quietly - honestly the siris and nests and
         | alexas all got like one iteration and then stopped it feels
         | like.
         | 
         | I want more features but less LLM. I want more control, and
         | more predictability. Eg if every night around 1am I say "play
         | rain sounds" my god just learn that I'm not, in all likelihood,
         | asking to hear an album I've never listened to!
        
       | yanis_t wrote:
       | I'm still waiting till the promise of voice AI that was showed
       | during the OpenAI demo in 2024 turn real somehow. It's not clear
       | to me, why there has been zero progress since then.
        
         | j45 wrote:
         | What tech can do vs applying it requires it often to be
         | configured and packaged to be usable in that way.
        
           | phito wrote:
           | It also needs to work at least 99% of the time if not more.
           | Not easy to do this with indeterministic models.
        
             | recursive wrote:
             | If my lights and heat were 99% reliable, I'd be getting new
             | lights and heat.
        
               | bigstrat2003 wrote:
               | In those cases yeah, 99% isn't reliable enough. I'm not
               | going to tolerate having power down for 3 days out of the
               | year. But in fairness, home automation is less critical
               | than that so 99% reliability is still acceptable to me. I
               | don't think LLMs are anywhere near that, though, nor is
               | there any sign of them getting there any time soon. So it
               | does concern me to use an LLM as the backbone of home
               | automation.
        
               | bombcar wrote:
               | I took 99% reliable as meaning not having to repeat the
               | command, which given that Siri is something like 50%
               | reliable by that metric, 99% sounds like heaven.
        
       | voidUpdate wrote:
       | Do people like talking to voice assistants? I've used one
       | occasionally (mostly for timers when I'm cooking), but most of
       | the time it would be faster for me to just do it myself, and
       | feels much less awkward than talking to empty air, asking it to
       | do things for me. It might be because I just really don't like
       | making more noise than I have to
       | 
       | (Yes, I appreciate that some people may be disabled in such a way
       | that it makes sense to use voice assistants, eg motor problems)
        
         | freeone3000 wrote:
         | I use it frequently for reminders and calendar events when not
         | at a computer, as voice is faster than the mobile interface
         | (with so many screens) for setting something up
        
         | RankingMember wrote:
         | I love it for lists- like my hands are full making something in
         | the kitchen and I can just tell it to add things to my grocery
         | list as soon as I notice I'm out of something.
        
         | hamdingers wrote:
         | I consider each time I need to pull out my phone and "do it
         | myself" to be a failure of my smart home system.
         | 
         | If a light cannot be automatically on when I need it (like a
         | motion sensor) or controlled with a dedicated button within
         | arms reach (like a remote on my desk) then the third best
         | option is one that lets me control it without interrupting what
         | I'm doing, moving from where I am, using my hands, or
         | possessing anything (a voice assistant).
        
           | voidUpdate wrote:
           | Do you not just turn the light on when you go in a room, and
           | turn it off again when you go out? All the rooms in my flat
           | have switches next to the door
        
             | hamdingers wrote:
             | Yes, that would be a button within arms reach, something I
             | explicitly prefer over the voice assistant. I use them
             | frequently.
             | 
             | I don't have just one light per room though, some spaces
             | like my workshop or living room have a lot of lighting
             | options, and flitting around the room flipping a bunch of
             | switches is clumsy and unnecessary. The preference is
             | always towards automation (e.g. when I play a movie in
             | Jellyfin, the lights dim) but there are situations where I
             | just need to ask for the workbench light.
        
             | johannes1234321 wrote:
             | The Sun moves around, while I am in a room. It might be
             | high up when I enter a room, but after a while there may be
             | clouds or it may have set.
             | 
             | When watching a movie one may dimthe light. Once finished
             | one may need more lights.
             | 
             | When going to bed I may want to switch all lights off. When
             | getting up it may need some extra light.
             | 
             | A switch on the door is nice. More switches is better.
             | Being able to control from anywhere may be even nicer.
        
               | voidUpdate wrote:
               | So I grab my phone, open the homeassistant app, and mess
               | with the settings on my light, or use homeassistant
               | through my browser on my desktop. No yelling at a
               | computer needed
        
             | nickthegreek wrote:
             | My lights adjust their brightness and color spectrum
             | automatically throughout the day while also understanding
             | the time of year and sun position. This alone is next
             | level. All are voice/tablet controlled. When I start a
             | movie at night, lights will adjust automatically in my open
             | floor plan first level. All of this operates without me
             | ever having to give any mental energy beyond the initial
             | setup.
             | 
             | This is not just flip a switch territory.
        
             | wan23 wrote:
             | Many homes have a bunch of lights with their own switches,
             | like lamps. Also there are rooms with multiple entrances,
             | like a living room with a bedroom on the other side from
             | the from the front door entrance, which would involve
             | walking to the side of the room with the switch then
             | walking back through a dark room after you turn it off.
             | Being able to just get into bed and say "Alexa, turn off
             | all of the lights" is way more convenient than checking 14
             | light switches around my home.
        
         | Insanity wrote:
         | I guess most of my use is whilst driving, to start/stop music
         | or audiobooks, change navigation etc. Although changing
         | navigation through Siri is somewhat painful as it often gets my
         | intended destination wrong lol.
        
         | lordmathis wrote:
         | I started designing and building a voice assistant for myself
         | and then realized that the only time I'd find it useful would
         | be during cooking to set timers. But a loud extractor fan would
         | be running making the voice recognition very difficult.
        
           | jlokier wrote:
           | An extractor fan is the kind of consistent noise that good
           | signal processing and voice recognition ought to be able to
           | strip out, especially if using a dispersed mic array. Even if
           | your voice is much quieter (to your human ears) than the fan.
           | It's a channel separation problem.
        
         | nickthegreek wrote:
         | I prefer voice strongly. I don't want to stop what i am doing,
         | find a device, open the app, wait for it refresh, navigate and
         | click to get Milk on a list. Sure you can bring this down a few
         | steps, but all of which still require me to move, have a hand
         | and eye free.
        
         | harrall wrote:
         | I would, if they worked even 90%.
         | 
         | I mostly set timers because it's one of the few things that
         | always works.
        
         | phatskat wrote:
         | I pretty much only use them for timers and weather, and the
         | occasional lookup for quick random info. And this is all only
         | if I don't have a phone handy or eg the toddler is going to
         | timeout and I need to set his timer in the midst of him having
         | a meltdown about it.
         | 
         | It's why I haven't and won't enable Gemini, and I'll likely
         | chuck my nest minis once I'm forced to have an LLM-based
         | experience. Hopefully they'll be able to at least function as
         | dumb Bluetooth speakers still but I'm not holding out hope on
         | that end
        
         | nancyminusone wrote:
         | I don't. I pretty much don't like talking in general,
         | especially if I'm alone. Accordingly, no voice assistants; I
         | don't think I've ever triggered one except accidentally.
        
       | gausswho wrote:
       | This is five months old now. Any substantial changes to the
       | recommended setup?
        
         | nacs wrote:
         | It looks like the author has kept it updated since then.
         | 
         | They mention the "Qwen3.5 (35B)" model for example which was
         | released around 2 weeks ago.
        
           | Insanity wrote:
           | For some anecdata, I've set up Qwen3.5 on a RX 7900XTX last
           | weekend. It runs fine, did some simple coding prompts and got
           | responses in 15-30 seconds. It's my first foray into running
           | models locally just to see what's possible, and I guess I'm
           | happily surprised so far.
           | 
           | Also, the entire setup was done through Codex. I asked Codex
           | to figure out how to run models locally given my architecture
           | (Ubuntu, AMD GPU). It told me which steps to apply and I hit
           | zero snags.
        
       | hamdingers wrote:
       | If you're less concerned about privacy, I use Gemini 2.5 Flash
       | for this and it's exceptionally good and fast as a HA assistant
       | while being much cheaper than the electricity that would be
       | needed to keep a 3090 awake.
       | 
       | The thing that kills this for me (and they even mentioned it) is
       | wake word detection. I have both the HA voice preview and FPH
       | Satellite1 devices, plus have experimented with a few other
       | options like a Raspberry Pi with a conference mic.
       | 
       | Somehow nothing is even 50% good as my Echo devices at picking up
       | the wake word. The assistant itself is far better, but that
       | doesn't matter if it takes 2-3 tries to get it to listen to you.
       | If someone solves this problem with open hardware I'll be
       | immediately buying several.
        
         | jcims wrote:
         | I have a feeling beamforming microphone arrays might help here,
         | something like this could improve the audio being processed
         | substantially - https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-
         | interface/uma-8-m....
        
           | IshKebab wrote:
           | Alexa devices have these (or used to at least), but Google
           | Home's never did. So it shouldn't be necessary.
        
             | jcims wrote:
             | Yeah a small (ideally personalized) wakeword model would
             | probably outperform just about any audio wizardry.
        
           | ethagnawl wrote:
           | That's a good call. I have a PS3(?) mic/camera that I was
           | using when I was running the original Mycroft project on a
           | Pi. I wonder if that would help with the inbuilt HA mic not
           | waking for most of my family, most of the time. I will have
           | to look at my VA Preview device and its specs later because
           | I'm not sure if you can connect an external mic to it out-of-
           | the-box.
        
         | _spduchamp wrote:
         | How about a button?
         | 
         | I'd prefer to physically press a button on an intercom box than
         | having something churning away constantly processing sound.
        
           | pwillia7 wrote:
           | I'm in if I can embed it into my forearm
        
             | hamdingers wrote:
             | In the mid 2000s I had a setup where some children's walkie
             | talkie "spy watches" could be used to issue commands to a
             | completely DIY, relay based smart home system.
             | 
             | I'm looking forward to whenever my Pebble ships so I can
             | recreate that experience with this:
             | https://github.com/skylord123/pebble-home-assistant-ws
        
             | nickthegreek wrote:
             | apple watch gets you close.
        
           | kortilla wrote:
           | Rules out a bunch of cases where your hands are busy handling
           | ingredients in the kitchen, etc
        
           | hamdingers wrote:
           | If I have to go to a thing and push a button, I'd rather the
           | button do the thing I wanted in the first place. Voice
           | assistants are for when my hands are full or I don't want to
           | get up. (I wrote more about my home automation philosophy in
           | another comment[1]).
           | 
           | Also I have all my voice assistant devices mounted to the
           | ceiling
           | 
           | 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47399909
        
           | tomComb wrote:
           | The pebble index seems like the optimal form for this.
           | 
           | https://repebble.com/index
           | 
           | Could be pressed even if your hands were busy.
        
             | stavros wrote:
             | If you want to relax some constraints, I made something
             | similar for $10: https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-
             | voice-note-taker/
        
               | CurleighBraces wrote:
               | Did you have any luck with the power issues on the new
               | board?
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | The new board hasn't come yet, but a friend gave me a
               | great idea, to power the mic from a GPIO, which powers it
               | off completely when the ESP is off.
               | 
               | Hopefully the new boards will be here soon, but another
               | issue is that I don't really have anything that can
               | measure microamp consumption, so any testing takes days
               | of waiting for the battery to run down :(
               | 
               | I do think these clones are the issue, though. They had a
               | LED I couldn't turn off, so they'd literally shine
               | forever. They don't seem engineered for low quiescent
               | current, so fingers crossed with the new ones.
        
               | CurleighBraces wrote:
               | Makes a lot of sense :) thanks for the update.
               | 
               | I'll try to remember to creepy stalk you for updates as
               | the device sounds great!
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | You can sign up to my mailing list to get emails if you
               | want! It's at the end of each post.
        
           | croes wrote:
           | Time for a real life Star Trek comm badge
        
             | spacecrafter3d wrote:
             | We thought so too ;)
             | https://www.linkedin.com/posts/y-combinator_button-
             | computer-...
        
         | senkora wrote:
         | Why not use an easier to detect wake "word", like two claps in
         | quick succession? Or a couple of notes of a melody?
        
           | hamdingers wrote:
           | Can't clap if your hands are full and I would not subject my
           | family to my attempts at delivering a melody.
           | 
           | I haven't tried training my own wake word though, I'm tempted
           | to see if it improves things.
        
             | airstrike wrote:
             | Personally I'd pick "Cthulhu"
        
             | otikik wrote:
             | What about whistling?
        
         | ethagnawl wrote:
         | What's been surprising in my experience regarding the wake word
         | is that it recognizes _me_ (adult male) saying the wake word
         | ~95% of the time. However, it only registers the rest of my
         | family (women and children) ~30% of the time.
        
           | vineyardmike wrote:
           | I have no firsthand knowledge, but I'd strongly bet that the
           | home-assistant effort to donate training data is mostly get
           | adult males, and nearly zero children.
        
             | ethagnawl wrote:
             | Oh, I'm sure you're right. I've had people in my personal
             | life (non-technical; "AI enthusiasts") laugh at me over
             | concerns about training bias but this is likely a real
             | world example of it.
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | I think you can train your own wake word with
               | microWakeWord but I've never done it.
        
             | dghlsakjg wrote:
             | This was 2021 (so pre-llm), but I used to work for a
             | company that gathered data for training voice commands
             | (Alexa, Toyota, Sonos, were some clients). Basically, we
             | paid people to read digital assistant scripts at scale.
             | 
             | Your assumptions about training data do not match the
             | demographics of data I collected. The majority of what our
             | work revolved around was getting diversity into the
             | training data. We specifically recruited kids, older folks,
             | women, people with accented/dialected English and just
             | about every variety of speech that we could get our hands
             | on. The companies we worked with were insanely methodical
             | about ensuring that different people were included.
        
               | gmueckl wrote:
               | You are reporting on a deliberately curated effort vs.
               | what I understand is effectively voluntary data donation
               | without incentives. It's not surprising to me that the
               | later dataset ends up biased due to the differences in
               | sourcing.
        
             | bluGill wrote:
             | I remember when those systems first started collecting data
             | they were worried kids wouldn't be handled - but they
             | didn't know how to handle the privacy issuses with
             | recording kids so discouraged it. Women being missed is not
             | a surprise - but not anticipated.
        
         | robotswantdata wrote:
         | What about your wifi APs sensing which room you are in, with
         | your choice of hilarious dance moves as the trigger ?
         | 
         | Funky chicken for Gemini
         | 
         | Penguin dance for OpenAI
         | 
         | Claude?
        
       | daveoc64 wrote:
       | I've recently purchased a couple of the Home Assistant Voice
       | Preview Edition devices, and they leave a lot to be desired.
       | 
       | The wake word detection isn't great, and the audio quality is
       | abysmal (for voice responses, not music).
       | 
       | Amazon has ruined their Alexa and Echo devices with ads and
       | annoying nag messages.
       | 
       | I'd really like an open alternative, but the basics are lacking
       | right now.
        
         | touristtam wrote:
         | Can those devices (Amazon) be _jail broken_? I was just
         | wondering that this morning while taking a shower.
        
           | locao wrote:
           | Youtube is trying to push me to watch a video about jail
           | breaking the Echo Show for a week now. I didn't watch it, but
           | it's probably easy to find.
        
           | vineyardmike wrote:
           | Generally no. Big tech companies have gotten good at locking
           | down devices to the boot loader. Some of the signing keys for
           | certain OTA versions have leaked, but you can't rely on that.
           | 
           | Some of the devices contain browsers, and people have set up
           | hacky ways to turn them into thin clients through that, but
           | it's not particularly reliable IME.
           | 
           | I heard some Chinese brands which made similar hardware for
           | Chinese consumers don't lock their devices down, letting you
           | flash an open install of Android on them, but I haven't seen
           | anyone try that IRL.
        
           | mrpf1ster wrote:
           | Yes
           | 
           | https://xdaforums.com/t/unlock-root-twrp-unbrick-amazon-
           | echo...
        
       | tkems wrote:
       | One that I have been experimenting with is using analog phones
       | (including rotary ones!) to act as the satellites. I live in an
       | older home and have phone jacks in most of the rooms already so I
       | only had to use a single analog telephone adapter. [0] The
       | downside is I don't have wake word support, but it makes it more
       | private and I don't find myself missing my smart speakers that
       | much. At some point I would like to also support other types of
       | calls on the phones, but for now I need to get an LLM hooked up
       | to it.
       | 
       | [0] https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/worlds-most-
       | priv...
        
         | Obscurity4340 wrote:
         | I wish I was remotely closer to being this kind of hacker :(
        
       | ljclifford wrote:
       | actually the hardest part of a locally hosted voice assistant
       | isn't the llm. it's making the tts tolerable to actually talk to
       | every day.
       | 
       | the core issue is prosody: kokoro and piper are trained on read
       | speech, but conversational responses have shorter breath groups
       | and different stress patterns on function words. that's why
       | numbers, addresses, and hedged phrases sound off even when
       | everything else works.
       | 
       | the fix is training data composition. conversational and read
       | speech have different prosody distributions and models don't
       | generalize across them. for self-hosted, coqui xtts-v2 [1] is
       | worth trying if you want more natural english output than kokoro.
       | 
       | btw i'm lily, cofounder of rime [2]. we're solving this for
       | business voice agents at scale, not really the personal home
       | assistant use case, but the underlying problem is the same.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS [2] https://rime.ai
        
         | cdcarter wrote:
         | 80% of my home voice assistant requests really need no response
         | other than an affirmative sound effect.
        
           | nickthegreek wrote:
           | 100% agree. I dont want a Yes, Got it, Will do or even worse,
           | I have turned on the Bedroom Light. I want soft success ding
           | or a low failure boop.
        
             | colechristensen wrote:
             | Star Trek got it right. two beeps, "Low High" = yup, "High
             | Low" = nope
        
             | ffsm8 wrote:
             | why would you want an audio notification for a light? it
             | either turns on and it worked or it doesnt turn on. i see
             | no value in having a ding or anything of the kind
             | 
             | if i imagine constant dinging whenever i enter a room and
             | the motion sensor toggles the light innit i'd go mad
        
               | adolph wrote:
               | Need an ack aside from the system since the response
               | might take a few moments, maybe a "share and enjoy" in a
               | voice that sounds like it is smiling.
        
               | bluGill wrote:
               | The biggest use for me is 'guests will be here soon, turn
               | on the lights in front of the shed where they will park',
               | then latter when they are gone turn them off. I can't see
               | the lights from the house and the logical place for a
               | switch isn't in the house. Where I can see the lights a
               | manual switch is better. I don't have most of my lights
               | automated. The ones that are, are that way because I
               | can't see them from where I'd want to check and control
               | them
        
             | XorNot wrote:
             | Talk back is how you make sure what you asked for is what
             | happens.
             | 
             | An affirmative beep but the light does not turn on means
             | you have to guess what did.
        
         | cptskippy wrote:
         | > actually the hardest part of a locally hosted voice assistant
         | isn't the llm. it's making the tts tolerable to actually talk
         | to every day.
         | 
         | I would argue that the hardest part is correctly recognizing
         | that it's being addressed. 98% of my frustration with voice
         | assistants is them not responding when spoken to. The other 2%
         | is realizing I want them to stop talking.
        
         | bachittle wrote:
         | Coqui TTS is actually deprecated, the company shut down. I have
         | a voice assistant that is using gpt-5.4 and opus 4.6 using the
         | subsidized plans from Codex and Claude Code, and it uses STT
         | and TTS from mlx-audio for those portions to be locally hosted:
         | https://github.com/Blaizzy/mlx-audio
         | 
         | Here are the following models I found work well:
         | 
         | - Qwen ASR and TTS are really good. Qwen ASR is faster than
         | OpenAI Whisper on Apple Silicon from my tests. And the TTS
         | model has voice cloning support so you can give it any voice
         | you want. Qwen ASR is my default.
         | 
         | - Chatterbox Turbo also does voice cloning TTS and is more
         | efficient to run than Qwen TTS. Chatterbox Turbo is my default.
         | 
         | - Kitten TTS is good as a small model, better than Kokoro
         | 
         | - Soprano TTS is surprisingly really good for a small model,
         | but it has glitches that prevent it from being my default
         | 
         | But overall the mlx-audio library makes it really easy to try
         | different models and see which ones I like.
        
         | buildsjets wrote:
         | Can you make it sound just like Titus Moody? I want to hear
         | your voice assistant say "No sir, I don't hold with furniture
         | that talks."
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIjjDC3tFfU
        
         | quickthoughts wrote:
         | I've been working on the flip side of this with ASR models, but
         | the problem space is the same, conversational/real-world data
         | is needed. Whisper often mistook actual words I say and
         | hallucinate all the time when speaking technical jargon. The
         | solution is to fine-tuning whisper with my own data. Hardest
         | part imo was getting the actual data, which in turn got me to
         | build listenr (https://github.com/rebreda/listenr).It's an
         | always-on VAD-based audio dataset builder. Could be used for
         | building conversational/real-world voice datasets for TTS
         | models too?
         | 
         | After getting it working i was get motivation to actually able
         | to build out the full fine-tuning pipeline. I wrote a little
         | post about it all https://quickthoughts.ca/posts/listenr-asr-
         | training-data-pro...
        
       | xrd wrote:
       | I've been having a lot of fun using my old Mycroft AI device.
       | Neon is the new software package. It didn't solve the issues
       | highlighted in this thread, but it is a fun open device to hack
       | on. I wrote a little web app that will speak in the standard
       | voice and say things like "hey kids, I'm AI and know everything,
       | and your dad is really cool." They love to yell at me when I do
       | that.
        
       | kbuck wrote:
       | I bought a Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition to try out. It's
       | surprisingly good, but still falls short when compared to Google
       | Home speakers:
       | 
       | - Wake word detection isn't as good as the Google Homes (more
       | false positives, more false negatives - so I can't just tune
       | sensitivity).
       | 
       | - Mic and speakers are both of poor quality in comparison to
       | Google Home devices.
       | 
       | - Flow is awkward. On a Google Home device, you can say "Okay
       | Google, turn on the lights" with no pause. On the Voice PE, you
       | have to say "Hey Mycroft [awkward pause while you wait for the
       | acknowledgement noise] turn on the lights" - it seems like the
       | Google Home devices start buffering immediately after the wake
       | word, but the Voice PE doesn't.
       | 
       | - Voice fingerprints don't exist, so this prevents the device
       | from figuring out that two separate people are talking, or who is
       | talking to it.
       | 
       | - The device has poor identification of background noise, so if
       | you talk to it while there is a TV playing speech in the
       | background, it will continue to listen to the speech from the TV.
       | It will eventually transcribe everything you said + everything
       | from the TV and get confused. (This probably folds into the voice
       | print thing as well.)
       | 
       | On the upside, though:
       | 
       | - Setting it up was really easy.
       | 
       | - All of the entities I want to control with it are already
       | available, without needing to export them or set them up
       | separately in Google Home.
       | 
       | - Despite all of the above complaints, the device is probably
       | 80-90% of what I realistically need to use it day-to-day. If they
       | throw a better speaker and mic array in, I'd likely be
       | comfortable replacing all of my Google Homes.
        
       | quirk wrote:
       | The best fix I've made to any voice-mode AI is giving it a "done"
       | word. So it has to listen for "pineapple" before it's allowed to
       | process what I said. Just like radio comms (over and out).
        
         | system2 wrote:
         | I think you will get tired of saying pineapple.
        
       | leeeeeep1012 wrote:
       | nice i run one dictatorflow.com that i open sourced
       | lee101/voicetype
        
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       (page generated 2026-03-16 23:00 UTC)