Home Assistant sells units with duel microphones that aren't too expensive and work relatively well. But the local voice recognition wasn't great last I tried.
Dave
joined 2 years ago
Similar to the other user's response, I use the calendar integration, then add the things on the calendar (say, putting the recycling out to be collected). Then I have an automation that will read out a reminder at the time it is scheduled for in the calendar.
So the evening before recycling pickup every fortnight, it pipes up and says "Reminder: Recycling" or whatever.
Works pretty well for these regular reoccurring things. I haven't tried using it for one off reminders, and you can't say "ok nabu, remind me to wish Steve a happy birthday on the 27th of February" or anything like that. Still, I'm pretty happy.
I seem to remember needing a bit of playing to get the notification working, I'm happy to look up and post what I have in my automation if needed.
In Home Assistant, in the settings, if you go to Voice Assistants then click the ... on your assistant and click Debug, you can see what it thought you said (and what it did).
Setting a timer on an up to date Home Assistant will repeat back what it set. E.g. If I say "Set a timer for 2 minutes" it will say "Timer set for 2 minutes". It says "Done" when running some Home Assistant task/automation, so it's probably not understanding you correctly (hence what the debug option is good for). I use the cloud voice recognition as I couldn't get the local version to understand my accent when I tried it (a year ago). It's through Azure but is proxied by Home Assistant so they don't know it's you.
The wake word responds to me, but not my girlfriend's voice.
My wife swears it's sexist, she has a bit of trouble too. In the integration options you can set the sensitivity to make it more sensitive, but it does increase false activations. I have it on the most sensitive and she can activate it first time most of the time.
I agree that it's not production ready and they know that too, hence the name. But in relation to your points, I plugged in some speaker as it's not really that great of a speaker at all.
For the wake word, at some point they did an update to add a sensitivity setting so you can make it more sensitive. You could also ty donating your voice to the training: https://ohf-voice.github.io/wake-word-collective/
But all in all you're spot on with the challenges. I'd add a couple more.
With OpenAI I find it can outperform other voice assistants in certain areas. Without it, you come up across weird issues, like my wife always says "set timer 2 minutes" and it runs off to OpenAI to work out what that means. If you says "set a timer for 2 minutes" it understands immediately.
What I wish for is the ability to rewrite requests. Local voice recognition can't understand my accent so I use the proxied Azure speech to text via Home Assistant Clound, and it regularly thinks I'm saying "Cortana" (I'm NEVER saying Cortana!)
Oh and I wish it could do streaming voice recognition instead of waiting for you to finish talking then waiting for a pause before trying anything. My in-laws have a google home and if you say something like "set a timer for 2 minutes" it immediately responds because it was converting to text as it went, and knew that nothing more was coming after a command like that. HAVP has perhaps a 1 second delay between finishing speaking and replying, assuming it doesn't need another 5 seconds to go to open AI. And you have to be quiet in that 1 second otherwise it thinks you're still talking (a problem in a busy room).
In NZ we've had electronic card payments outside of the credit card system for about 40-something years.
It just took a long time to catch up to online payments, but it's slowly getting there.
Nothing says they have a successful AI product as much as needing your staff to work 70 hour weeks. Shouldn't AI startups be advertising how their staff are so efficient they only work 10 hours a week but do their full performance?
You may be misunderstanding how thing work.
Average people create their own communities. Those people control those communities. You can make a community for cars, and if someone poats about busses you can remove the post. The person who makes a community is the one that controls it.
It has nothing to do with the platform, you are just posting in a community run by people who don't want that kind of post there. So pick a different community? And read the side bar before you post.
Piefed operates the same way.
The same in NZ. Is this that you never ever wear shoes on inside?
Is it acceptable to walk into your own house and walk around with shoes on? Sure.
Do most people do that most of the time? In my experience, people will be shoes off in their own home most of the time, but it's not some big taboo to keep them on if you're popping in to grab something.
Well, that's a good point. However, if I wanted to export a CSV with only one decimal place, it would be mighty annoying if changing it to one in Excel didn't save it like that in the CSV. Unless there was another option to control that.
Yeah thanks, I didn't understand the original problem but I've got it now 🙂
Ahhh, the excel format keeps the precision but changes the display to 1 decimal. When exported to CSV, only that 1 decimal is exported, so you can't bring back what isn't there. But the original file still has it.
I understand now, thanks! Definitely a coworker problem not an Excel problem then.
Possibly related:
I also don't understand why every chat app needs 1GB of RAM to itself.
This morning my kid asked the voice assistant to "Turn off the computers in this house".
I heard it, thought well that's a strange request but seems harmless because how is home assistant gonna turn off computers.
Me a little while later, "why is shit broken? What's happening!"
Turns out dumb me had adguard exposed to the voice assistant, it switched off all the adguard settings including the DNS rewriting that is the cornerstone of many of my self-hosted services.
I've since revoked that access.
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I was trying to get it to pause Pi-hole on request. I'm using Home Assistant Cloud (Nabu Casa) for speech to text, and have also got OpenAI plugged into it for if it doesn't recognise a command. The screen shot is from the debug logs that I eventually found after struggling to work out why it wasn't running my automation.
I'm using the new Home Assistant Voice Preview. Don't get me wrong, overall very happy with it for the price point, but for some reason the cloud speech recognition (I believe powered by Google) is very good at understanding me until I start trying to talk about ad blocking.
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I think it's a pretty cool toy to play with. It mostly gets used for setting timers and playing music, but you can add Home Assistant automations that trigger when you say certain things. Lot's to play with if that's your idea of fun!