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    The era of open voice assistants

    (www.home-assistant.io)
    878 points _Microft | 13 comments | 20 Dec 24 00:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.85s | source | bottom
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    Jarwain ◴[20 Dec 24 04:02 UTC] No.42468180[source]▶
    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

    replies(5): >>42468413 #>>42468436 #>>42468945 #>>42469600 #>>42470457 #
    1. Brendinooo ◴[20 Dec 24 05:01 UTC] No.42468413[source]▶
    I invested in Mycroft and it flopped. Here’s hoping some others can go where they couldn’t.
    replies(5): >>42468709 #>>42469160 #>>42470293 #>>42470771 #>>42473432 #
    2. ◴[20 Dec 24 06:09 UTC] No.42468709[source]▶
    3. bdavbdav ◴[20 Dec 24 08:04 UTC] No.42469160[source]▶
    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.
    replies(1): >>42470242 #
    4. balloob ◴[20 Dec 24 11:31 UTC] No.42470242[source]▶
    Our estimates are more than a million active instances https://analytics.home-assistant.io/
    replies(1): >>42470953 #
    5. bronco21016 ◴[20 Dec 24 11:41 UTC] No.42470293[source]▶
    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.

    6. geerlingguy ◴[20 Dec 24 13:06 UTC] No.42470771[source]▶
    IIRC one of the main devs behind this device came from Mycroft.
    replies(2): >>42471981 #>>42473759 #
    7. emsixteen ◴[20 Dec 24 13:38 UTC] No.42470953{3}[source]▶
    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? :)

    replies(2): >>42471673 #>>42472285 #
    8. schnapsidee ◴[20 Dec 24 15:07 UTC] No.42471673{4}[source]▶
    > 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.
    9. dole ◴[20 Dec 24 15:34 UTC] No.42471981[source]▶
    OP's username checks out.
    10. alias_neo ◴[20 Dec 24 16:09 UTC] No.42472285{4}[source]▶
    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.

    11. tacticalturtle ◴[20 Dec 24 18:23 UTC] No.42473432[source]▶
    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

    replies(1): >>42474797 #
    12. robotfelix ◴[20 Dec 24 18:55 UTC] No.42473759[source]▶
    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/

    13. NoNotTheDuo ◴[20 Dec 24 20:39 UTC] No.42474797[source]▶
    I think another part is that there is a failure mechanism on their boards that was recently identified: https://community.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.