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The era of open voice assistants

(www.home-assistant.io)
878 points _Microft | 3 comments | 20 Dec 24 00:29 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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nickthegreek ◴[20 Dec 24 04:08 UTC] No.42468203[source]▶
And on back order everywhere. I just spent the last 2 weeks getting a esp32-s3-box setup to do this but its lack of audio out really irks me.
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1. joshstrange ◴[20 Dec 24 05:40 UTC] No.42468583[source]▶
And the mic is not all that great either. I have a couple of them but they just weren't reliably picking up my voice and I couldn't hear the reply either (when it did hear me). I figured it would be easy to add a speaker to them but that sent me down a rabbit hole that I gave up on and put them in a drawer. I'll buy this for sure though because when the ESP32 box thing worked it worked really well and I loved being able to swap out parts of the assist pipeline.
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2. nickthegreek ◴[20 Dec 24 14:18 UTC] No.42471252[source]▶
I ended up moddng the s3 yaml to turn off the internal speaker and to forward all voice responses to a google hub.
3. alias_neo ◴[20 Dec 24 16:44 UTC] No.42472587[source]▶
To be fair, the issue with the Box-3 is HA's implementation; I used it with heywillow.io and it was incredible, I could speak to it from another room and it would pick up perfectly.

The audio out is terrible so I wrote a shim-server that captures the request to the TTS server for heywillow and sent it to a speaker I build myself running MPD on a Pi with a nice DAC and have it play the responses instead of the box-3's tiny speaker.

I don't expect the audio-out on this to be much better with its tiny speaker, but at least it has a 3.5mm jack.

I'm going to look into what that Grove port can do too and perhaps build a new speaker "module" that the Voice PE can sit on top of to make it a proper music device.