The era of open voice assistants

I don't fully understand the cloud upsell. I have a beefy GPU. I would like to run the "more advanced" models locally.

By "I don't fully understand," I mean just that. There's a lot of marketing copy, but there's a lot I'd like to understand better before plopping down $$$ for a unit. The answers might be reasonable.

Ideally, I'd be able to experiment with a headset first, and if it works well, upgrade to the $59 unit.

I'd love to just have a README, with a getting started tutorial, play, and then upgrade if it does what I want.

Again: None of this is a complaint. I assume much of this is coming once we're past preview addition, or is perhaps there and my search skills are failing me.

The cloud sale is easy if you are an HA user already. If you don’t use Home Assistant right now, you probably rec it the target audience. I purchase the yearly cloud service as it’s an easy way to support HA development. It also gives you remote access to your system without having to do any setup. It provides an https connection which allows you to program esp32 devices through Chrome. And now they added the ability to do TTS and STT on someone else’s hardware. HA even allows you to setup a local llm for house control commands but route other queries directly to the cloud.