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The era of open voice assistants

(www.home-assistant.io)
878 points _Microft | 16 comments | 20 Dec 24 00:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.4s | source | bottom
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thumbsup-_- ◴[20 Dec 24 04:01 UTC] No.42468176[source]▶
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

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lokar ◴[20 Dec 24 05:44 UTC] No.42468600[source]▶
It’s a great project overall, but I’ve been frustrated by how anti-engineer it has been trending.
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1. sofixa ◴[20 Dec 24 07:40 UTC] No.42469060[source]▶
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).

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2. philjohn ◴[20 Dec 24 08:12 UTC] No.42469193[source]▶
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.
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3. ncallaway ◴[20 Dec 24 08:36 UTC] No.42469310[source]▶
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).

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4. sofixa ◴[20 Dec 24 09:48 UTC] No.42469589{3}[source]▶
> 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).

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5. lolinder ◴[20 Dec 24 12:59 UTC] No.42470727{4}[source]▶
Where and how are those configs stored? There has to be a backing representation somewhere, right?
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6. sofixa ◴[20 Dec 24 13:20 UTC] No.42470855{5}[source]▶
In the Home assistant database (which is SQLite IIRC).
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7. lokar ◴[20 Dec 24 15:31 UTC] No.42471952{6}[source]▶
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.
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8. iamjackg ◴[20 Dec 24 15:31 UTC] No.42471951{6}[source]▶
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.
9. lokar ◴[20 Dec 24 15:33 UTC] No.42471971[source]▶
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.
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10. ramses0 ◴[20 Dec 24 17:06 UTC] No.42472774{3}[source]▶
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.

11. cryptoegorophy ◴[20 Dec 24 17:56 UTC] No.42473207[source]▶
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.
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12. lolinder ◴[20 Dec 24 18:22 UTC] No.42473420{7}[source]▶
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.

13. philjohn ◴[20 Dec 24 21:45 UTC] No.42475370{3}[source]▶
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.

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14. jillyboel ◴[21 Dec 24 02:01 UTC] No.42476922[source]▶
> when I try to code it with ChatGPT

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

15. jevogel ◴[21 Dec 24 02:53 UTC] No.42477169{4}[source]▶
Why do you think they would get rid of YAML files? Is that on the roadmap?
16. thumbsup-_- ◴[21 Dec 24 05:34 UTC] No.42477742[source]▶
I don’t think that’s true. Their docs are great and the community is active and responsive in forums and github