The era of open voice assistants

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.

How did you find it for music tasks?

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

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.