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The era of open voice assistants

(www.home-assistant.io)
879 points _Microft | 1 comments | 20 Dec 24 00:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.251s | source
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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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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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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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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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1. ramses0 ◴[20 Dec 24 17:06 UTC] No.42472774[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.