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The era of open voice assistants

(www.home-assistant.io)
879 points _Microft | 2 comments | 20 Dec 24 00:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.419s | source
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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

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1. choffee ◴[20 Dec 24 09:49 UTC] No.42469600[source]▶
Not really sure what the benefit of group buy would be here. Nuba Casa, the company that supports the development of home assistant and developed this product, already has a few products they sell. They had this stocked all over the world for the announcement and it sold out. I assume they had already made a few thousand. They will get more stock now and it will sell just like the other things they make. Any profit from this will go back into development of Home Assistant.
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2. Jarwain ◴[20 Dec 24 15:42 UTC] No.42472047[source]▶
Heh thus far I've been an excited spectator of HomeAssistant, and wasn't aware of Nuba Casa until doing research for a different comment on the thread. I do love and appreciate their model here

I guess the benefits that came to mind are - alternative crowdsourced route for sourcing hardware, to avoid things like that raspberry pi shortage (although if it's due to broader supply chain issues then this doesn't necessarily help) - hardware forks! If someone wanted a version with a more powerful ESP32, or a GPS, or another mic, or an enclosure for a battery and charging and all that, took the time to fork the design to add these features, and found X other users interested in the fork to get it produced... (of course I might be betraying my ignorance on how easy it is to set up this sort of alternative manufacturing chain or what unit amounts are necessary to make this kind of forking economical)