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The era of open voice assistants

(www.home-assistant.io)
879 points _Microft | 4 comments | 20 Dec 24 00:29 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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frognumber ◴[20 Dec 24 03:56 UTC] No.42468148[source]▶
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.

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1. trb ◴[20 Dec 24 03:59 UTC] No.42468158[source]▶
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.

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2. bdavbdav ◴[20 Dec 24 08:08 UTC] No.42469180[source]▶
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.

3. alias_neo ◴[20 Dec 24 16:19 UTC] No.42472386[source]▶
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.

4. squarefoot ◴[20 Dec 24 23:27 UTC] No.42476174[source]▶
In many cases the issue isn't the microphone but the horrid amount of reflections that the sound produces before reaching it. A quite good microphone can be built using cheap, yet very clean, capsules like the AOM-5024L-HD-F-R (80 dB s/n) which is ~$3 at Mouser, but room acoustics is a lot more important and also a real pain in the ass when also not a bank account drain if done professionally, although usually carpets, wood furniture, curtains to cover glass and sound panels on concrete walls can be more than enough.