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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: 0s | source
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lxe ◴[20 Dec 24 04:42 UTC] No.42468351[source]▶
Here's what I'm looking for in a voice assistant:

- Full privacy: nothing goes to the "cloud"

- Non-shitty microphones and processing: i want to be able to be heard without having to yell, repeat, or correct

- No wake words: it should listen to everything, process it, and understand when it's being addressed. Since everything is private and local, this is now doable

- Conversational: it should understand when I finished talking, have ability to be interrupted, all with low latency

- Non-stupid: it's 2024, and alexa and siri and google are somehow absolutely abysmal at doing even the basics

- Complete: i don't want to use an app to get stuff configured. I want everything to be controlled via voice

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danparsonson ◴[20 Dec 24 04:55 UTC] No.42468394[source]▶
> No wake words: it should listen to everything, process it, and understand when it's being addressed

Even humans struggle with this one - that's what names are for!

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antonyt ◴[20 Dec 24 05:07 UTC] No.42468438[source]▶
Yeah, I’m having a hard time imagining how no-wake-word could work in practice.
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fragmede ◴[20 Dec 24 06:44 UTC] No.42468837[source]▶
after setting up the system, if I say "turn the ceiling lights to 20%", who else would be changing the lights?

But also, post-fix wake word would also be natural if it was recording all the time. "turn on the lights, Google", for instance

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1. danparsonson ◴[20 Dec 24 23:21 UTC] No.42476125{3}[source]▶
Sure, if the system is set up to only respond to very specific commands that humans would not respond to, I guess that could work. I was thinking more about the other way around, where a person might speak to someone else in the room and be overheard and acted upon - "turn on the lights!" could be a command for the computer controlling the room, or the human standing next to the Christmas tree, for example.