←back to thread

The era of open voice assistants

(www.home-assistant.io)
878 points _Microft | 6 comments | 20 Dec 24 00:29 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
Show context
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

replies(4): >>42468245 #>>42468600 #>>42468963 #>>42470197 #
1. PhilippGille ◴[20 Dec 24 11:23 UTC] No.42470197[source]▶
> We need more projects like home assistant

Isn't openHAB an existing popular alternative?

https://www.openhab.org/

replies(2): >>42470597 #>>42473729 #
2. btreecat ◴[20 Dec 24 12:41 UTC] No.42470597[source]▶
HA long ago blew past OpenHAB in functionality and community.

Unless you have a hard-on for JVM services, HA is the better XP these days.

replies(2): >>42470632 #>>42470920 #
3. diggan ◴[20 Dec 24 12:45 UTC] No.42470632[source]▶
> HA long ago blew past OpenHAB in [...] community.

Home Assistant seems insurmountable to beat at that specific metric, seems to be the single biggest project in terms of contributions from a wide community. Makes sense, Home Assistant tries to do a lot of things, and succeeds at many of them.

4. yurishimo ◴[20 Dec 24 13:32 UTC] No.42470920[source]▶
When I was evaluating both projects about 5 years ago, I went with openHAB because they had native apps with native controls (and thus nicer design imo). At the time, HA was still deep in YML config files and needed validation before saving etc etc. Not great UX.

Nowadays, HA has more of the features I would want and other external projects exist to create your own dashboards that take advantage of native controls.

Today I’m using Homey because I’m still a sucker for design and UX after a long day of coding boring admin panels in the day job, but I think in another few years when the hardware starts to show its age that I will move to home assistant. Hell, there exists an integration to bring HA devices into Homey but that would require running two hubs and potentially duplicating functionality. We shall see.

replies(1): >>42478215 #
5. tedivm ◴[20 Dec 24 18:52 UTC] No.42473729[source]▶
I think they meant "projects with a culture and mindset like homeassistant", not just a competitor to the existing project.
6. lurking_swe ◴[21 Dec 24 08:20 UTC] No.42478215{3}[source]▶
I keep it simple, I use the HomeKit bridge integration to expose the Home Assistant devices that I want in iOS. I don’t expose everything, though, some of the more advanced or obscure devices I purposely keep hidden in Home Assistant. It strikes a nice balance in my opinion.

i’m assuming you can do something similar with Google home, etc.

but like you said, you could always build your own dashboard from scratch if you wanted to.