The era of open voice assistants

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

It’s a great project overall, but I’ve been frustrated by how anti-engineer it has been trending.

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).

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.

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).

> 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).

Where and how are those configs stored? There has to be a backing representation somewhere, right?

In the Home assistant database (which is SQLite IIRC).