The era of open voice assistants

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

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.

It’s a great project overall, but I’ve been frustrated by how anti-engineer it has been trending.

How so?

Completely agree! Home Assistant feels like a breath of fresh air in a space dominated by big tech's walled gardens.

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).

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.

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).

> 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).

> We need more projects like home assistant

Isn't openHAB an existing popular alternative?

https://www.openhab.org/

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.

> 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.

Where and how are those configs stored? There has to be a backing representation somewhere, right?

In the Home assistant database (which is SQLite IIRC).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think they meant "projects with a culture and mindset like homeassistant", not just a competitor to the existing project.

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.

Or the Digital alchemy addon. Let's you write your automations using typescript

> when I try to code it with ChatGPT

so don't do that... just rtfm and it's easy

Why do you think they would get rid of YAML files? Is that on the roadmap?

+1 on installing supervised on stock debian. It feels like any other software and I still get to keep full control of my system.

I’m currently running, HA, Frigate and pihole on same machine

I don’t think that’s true. Their docs are great and the community is active and responsive in forums and github

I keep it simple, I use the HomeKit bridge integration to expose the Home Assistant devices that I want in iOS. I don’t expose everything, though, some of the more advanced or obscure devices I purposely keep hidden in Home Assistant. It strikes a nice balance in my opinion.

i’m assuming you can do something similar with Google home, etc.

but like you said, you could always build your own dashboard from scratch if you wanted to.

Im a different user- but I can say I’ve been frustrated with their refusal to support OIDC/oauth/literally any standard login system. There is a very long thread on their forums documenting the many attempts for people to contribute this feature.[0] The devs simply shut it down every time, with little to no explanation.

I run many self hosted applications on my local network. Homeassistant is the only one I’m running that has its own dedicated login. Everything else I’m using has OIDC support, or I can at least unobtrusively stick a reverse proxy in front to require OIDC login.

[0] https://community.home-assistant.io/t/open-letter-for-improv...

Edit: things like this [1] don’t help either. Where one of the HA devs threatens to relicense a dependency so that NixOS can’t use it, because… he doesn’t want them to? The license permits them to. Seemed very against the spirit of open source to me.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277

I have four Home Assistants pinned in the browser on my laptop. I look after several more.

Thanks for the heads up about Digital Alchemy, now I have to go and evaluate it 8)

I already have upgrades to my 3D printer sat waiting, and a massive stack of software to go through for work and home.

I've just finished replacing all the door handles in my home (long story) and the flush button on the down stair bog. It turns out that most of my home lighting has a spare conductor available or I can use a dimmer instead, so smart lighting is indicated at the switch. One lot done, more to do.

All of my smart IoT stuff must be locally administrated and have a manual option if the network is unavailable, if possible and work as well as a non smart effort with regards power. So my doorbell is a Reolink job on the THINGS VLAN with no access to the internet. It is PoE powered and the switch is powered by a UPS. You get the idea.

I run my home IoT smart stuff with the same rigor as I do at work. I'm an IT consultant these days but I did study Civ Eng at college.

HA allows for plenty of solid engineering for engineers. You can do it all in the GUI with decent integrations as a "newbie" with confidence that you won't go too far wrong. You've also got a really solid Zwave stack aside a well integrated MQTT stack - how much more do you want?

Theres also a Zigbee stack too, which is ideal for cheap stuff. My Lidl smart switches work really well at quite a long range.

I could go on at length ... 8)

How much more engineer do you need?