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.

I can't speak to home assistant specifically, but the last time I looked at voice models, supporting multiple languages and doing it Really Well just happens to require a model with a massive amount of RAM, especially to run at anything resembling real-time.

It's be awesome if they open sourced that model though, or published what models they're using. But I think it unlikely to happen because home assistant is a sorta funnel to nabu casa

That said, from what I can find, it sounds like Assist can be run without the hardware, either with or without the cloud upgrade. So you could definitely use your own hardware, headset, speakers, etc. to play with Assist

shrug whisper seems to do well on my GPU, and faster than realtime.