With Sonos shitting the bed with its app update and now the prospect of Alexa being destroyed by fees and AI, my smart home infrastructure is falling apart. So disappointing.
Clent@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 13:41
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This is why I went with HomeKit devices. I do not understand why people trust Amazon or Google, their business models are not pro-consumer.
If Apple pulled at one of the maneuvers these two have, there would be a flood of articles condemning them. No one expects Amazon or Google to respect you.
commandar@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 14:17
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It’s why I’ve avoided anything smarthome tied to any particular vendor.
My endpoint devices are almost entirely Zwave or Zigbee/Matter based. I started out with a SmartThings hub but migrated it all to Home Assistant last year. HA has honestly had easier integrations than SmartThings did and supports almost anything under the sun.
I don’t have to worry about suddenly losing control of my devices and the only ‘subscription’ associated with it all is $15/year for a domain name to make setting up remote access easier. This approach requires a little more research, but it opens up the ability to mix and match devices however you’d like. Absolutely zero regrets.
Are you using microphones or is it entirely app based? And if so what microphones are you using?
commandar@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 23:18
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I’m not currently, but I do know that HA has made specific pushes to improve voice-control over the past year. Should be numerous blog posts on their website about it.
It’s hilarious you think Apple is in any way pro-consumer. Apple is all about their walled gardens, but they’re a trap. Their entire business model is designed to use various underhanded means to entice you into their ecosystem and at every step make it increasingly difficult to escape it all so that they can keep extracting money from you. Google and Microsoft aren’t much better but they are better ironically because they’re not as good at disguising their bait and traps as Apple is.
gh0stcassette@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 22 May 2024 16:28
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I mean yeah. The only reason anyone is surprised when apple pulls shit like this is because they’re aggressively anti-consumer in their pricing and hardware design (parts pairing, poor reparability, etc.). People assume because they’re so flagrantly anti-consumer with their hardware, they can afford to not be so anti-consumer with their software. This is wrong, of course. They’re a publicly traded company, they’ll milk their users for every cent they can.
Yes. I understand the people who don’t use Apple products think they are smarter than those who do. Your list of common tropes is tiresome.
The reality is quite far from what you imagine. People who actually understand technology, people who are in the tech industry use Apple products at a higher rather than those who are not.
Instead of Apples well thought out walled garden, fools happily pay extra to play in Google/Amazon/Microsofts chain linked dirt pit. It’s hilarious what lengths people go to pretend that is a better experience; that rusty chain link with barbed wire is superior to walls
Holyginz@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 21:10
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You will learn eventually
orclev@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 13:46
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Never use anything that depends on the Internet for your smart home. There are entirely offline text to speech and voice recognition plugins/libraries for home assistant.
MegaUltraChicken@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 13:54
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Yeah I learned this lesson by starting with Smartthings and grew to hate the lack of reliability pretty quickly. Home Assistant and a raspberry pi has been significantly better.
b3an@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 15:33
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I too would like to change from Alexa echos to something else. But I don’t know what devices are readily with omni-directional mics and easy to migrate to. I use Alexa for simplicity but would gladly fill the gap with Home assistant and recommendations on good replacement mic/speakers.
I haven’t tried it myself (tho I’m planning to do so soon), but check Onju voice, it tries to do something kinda similar.
I hope someone tries do pull that on an echo dot. Good hardware, shit software.
Edit: Update with related links.
The Onju Github i forgot before, tho it’s linked in pcbway. It has instructions to set it up along with home assistant and even a matrix bridge.
Onju voice satellite is a different project using the same custom pcb. This one looks better integrated with home assistant and has an actual wakeword system (unlike og onju, which doesn’t have one by design). This one feels more like “better private alexa for home assistant”.
I can’t ask a question? I am in the Alexa infrastructure and would like to change and I don’t know what’s good to use instead. People are really shitty.
Don’t take it personally. It’s just a few trolls who think they’re superior. Your question is valid and I’m also interested in alternatives too. I have home assistant, but it’s another thing entirely to more easily swap out Alexa for some equally well supported mic/speaker hardware. I’m sure this will change with people being motivated not to give Amazon subscription fees and ‘to finally’ cut the online requirements. I would love local voice control so that I’m not reliant on phone apps if the internet goes out.
Depends somewhat. Home Assistant has its own app that works pretty well. Generally other apps don’t integrate with Home Assistant, but rather the other way around with Home Assistant having a plug-in to allow it to control and interact with other hardware/software. Everything is controlled/managed by Home Assistant so when you need to issue commands or setup triggers its your one stop shop.
I know there are voice control plugins for Home Assistant that are reviewed reasonably well, but I don’t personally use them so I can’t say what models of mic work well or not. My usage is pretty minimal with simple timers and/or things like presence and temperature sensors being sufficient to meet all my automation needs supplemented by the occasional custom UI button on my Home Assistant dashboard accessible through the app or web interface. Personally the rule I try to follow for all my IoT devices is to avoid Wifi if at all possible in favor of standard mesh network tech like Zigbee or Z-Wave that way it’s literally impossible for my “smart devices” to call out to the Internet without me manually installing some kind of bridging software in Home Assistant.
So I got curious and did a little research. Home assistant itself provides several tutorials for setting up voice controls. There are several options to choose from. The simplest to get up and running seems like signing up for home assistant cloud and paying a monthly fee, although that’s also the least private and most costly option. At the other extreme you can go entirely DIY by picking up a cheap dev board for around $14, flashing it with ESPHome and hooking it up to your local voice assistant setup.
I haven’t personally used any of this as I’ve said previously, but everything I’ve read seems reasonable and it sounds like it’s the generally accepted way to go about doing these things with Home Assistant.
Edit: Reading the reviews of the ATOM Echo it seems like a lot of people complain about the mic and speaker quality and issues with it going into sleep mode. A more expensive but possibly better option might be one of the ESP32 S3 Box models flashed with ESPHome, although once again I have not personally used any of this so I can’t say whether the complaints about the ATOM Echo hold water or if the S3 Box is better. There also seems to be a Assist app for at least Android, so if you don’t want a dedicated hardware device you might be able to make do with just your phone.
Edit 2: This also looks like it might be a great option. It looks a little more polished and ready to go, and is supported by ESPHome.
Why the downvotes? this is a legitimate good question as there are many available and people may have important experiences to share. Looking to set up my own someday (hopefully soon) and am interested in what has worked well for people as well.
Bluetooth and USB speakerphones seem to work fairly well as both mic and speaker. I think thr sennheiser sp20 has been in a couple tinkerers posts I’ve seen.
Boddhisatva@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 14:00
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I wonder how many fools are out there that will pay for this.
SouthFresh@lemmy.ml
on 22 May 2024 14:07
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Too many, way, way too many,
canis_majoris@lemmy.ca
on 22 May 2024 18:24
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The same amount of fools who created the largest civilian surveillance network with Ring doorbells.
Bonehead@kbin.social
on 22 May 2024 14:18
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And this is exact the reason I'm building a Home Assistant instance with local voice processing. Right now it takes a few seconds to process a request and take action on my crappy 1.8ghz laptop with only 4gb of RAM, but it basically does everything I use Alexa for. This announcement is just encouraging me to build a better server with an esp32 satellite.
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de
on 22 May 2024 15:23
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I’m still working on question one too. It seems like a microphone array is the best option but a lot of them seem over built for the task.
b3an@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 15:36
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Agreed. I can’t seem to find something that I can migrate to which doesn’t require a huge reprogramming effort. I would love local control but don’t want to spend my Saturdays and freetime struggling to figure out why it’s suddenly not working. Alexa is shitty and doesn’t have tons of flexible control, but it’s ‘uptime’ is very good, and does well for playing audio for the fam. self note… Get away from Spotify while I’m at it 😭
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de
on 22 May 2024 15:48
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I don’t mind building the stuff when I’m in the mood. When Logitech decided to shut down the Harmony remote line I wrote my own version of a Hub into Home Assistant It was fun and it works better.
But now I’m tech support for it and if it breaks down I have to work on it whether I want to or not. It’s put me off wanting to build more stuff from scratch.
This is an instance where I think the folks at nobu casa (paid branch of home assistant development) could dedicate some resources to hardware. Instead of the prebuilt SBC stuff like HA-blue, or yellow or whatever. Create an esp device that just has a reliable microphone, and crank them out. I’d buy one for every room in my house!
I’ve got an esp army in my greenhouse that runs wLED, and one of them has a mic for doing the sound reactive display stuff, but it’s running wLED, not ESPHome… I wonder how easy it would be to just slap a digital mic on some of the other esp things I’ve got floating around?
I guess it would be too easy to just have Plug and Play option. 🤷 I am technically inclined but I don’t want to spend a ton of time recreating the wheel.
Bonehead@kbin.social
on 22 May 2024 18:34
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Honestly, nothing yet. I've only been playing with it for a few weeks. I just use the web interface on my phone to test the voice control. I've been looking at the esp32 devices that people have been building, but a lot of them admit that they can't come anywhere close to the reliability of the microphone array used in the Alexa.
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de
on 22 May 2024 15:25
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I’m in the process of this now too. The only need that I can’t figure out within home-assistant assist, is unit conversions. Converting measurements when cooking is one of the main things we use the Alexa for these days.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 22 May 2024 22:32
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Can it play music from YouTube or Spotify or something? Because that’s literally all my kids want an Alexa device for.
altima_neo@lemmy.zip
on 22 May 2024 14:35
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Yeah nah, not gonna pay for that
TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 15:14
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Just what the cash-strapped people of the world want - more monthly fees.
snooggums@midwest.social
on 22 May 2024 15:57
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Looks like companies are shifting to charging users whose data they are stealing.
The saying ‘if you aren’t the customer, you are the product’ is outdated. Now you are the customer and the product!
ichbinjasokreativ@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 17:36
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Windows has done this for ages now. Buying a laptop, you pay well over $100 for the windows license alone, yet it is the most egregious operating system when it comes to datamining the user.
admin@lemmy.my-box.dev
on 23 May 2024 06:19
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And then they started putting ads for subscriptions in the os.
NutWrench@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 15:59
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And for something that is already data-mining you. Adding a fee just adds insult to injury.
IHeartBadCode@kbin.social
on 22 May 2024 16:35
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Yeah, I think that's the bigger issue here. These devices pay their way by collecting data to sell off. What this "overhual" is indicating is that they haven't quite figured out how to make these devices not only pay for themselves, but also, generate a net background profit for the company.
The only thing I'm reading from this story is that Amazon is just aiming for more dollar signs from Alexia. I'm going tell you in the day and age of Siri and Whatever Google's thing is, this is going to backfire massively on Amazon. This will likely collapse whatever paltry Alexia that's out there. And I have a good feeling they'll look at this collapse as "well the technology just isn't a good money maker." No you idiots, it's not a mass profit driver. I get how something not drawing double digit percentage gains is a mystery to you all, but just because you cannot buy your fifteenth yacht from it, doesn't mean that the technology is a failure.
But it's whatever, Amazon's ship to wreck.
adam_y@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 15:29
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Well, once again a tech company gives a service I don’t care for an overhaul I don’t want and tries to charge a fee I won’t pay.
I suspect when this doesn’t do the numbers they want they’ll try adding a user fee to oxygen as a retaliation.
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 16:37
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You should watch Spaceballs. They have Perri-Air.
Bizarroland@kbin.social
on 22 May 2024 17:19
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And you could also look at the real world. We have boost air.
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 17:32
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I am quite literally touching grass now, thank you very much.
Bogasse@lemmy.ml
on 22 May 2024 16:24
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I hope for one good thing to come out from all this AI madness : people might get used to pay for a service on the internet again. If this miraculously happens it could lead to people more cautiously choose services over quality instead of the one with darkest patterns.
One can still dream…
Bizarroland@kbin.social
on 22 May 2024 17:18
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I wouldn't get your hopes up too high.
You're thinking like you are the customer and the customer is always right, so if you pay for a service it should provide you what you want, right?
This is not that scenario.
You are not the customer. You are a product that is being sold to advertisers. It does not matter if you also pay them money, you are still the product. If you pay them money on top of being sold then you are just an especially profitable product.
Paying them money will not cause you to cease being a product, no matter how much money you are willing to pay.
If you use a different company's product that starts off with you being the customer, eventually, they will learn that they can make more money by selling you to other people, and they will.
sudo42@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 19:17
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Yup. Any entity ties to Wall St. must make that $ line go higher every quarter. The how doesn’t matter.
Uhhh…it’s had AI backing it for most of the decade
EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de
on 22 May 2024 18:48
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I was never going to buy one of those, but now I have a second good reason to not want my conversations eavesdropped on
Blackmist@feddit.uk
on 22 May 2024 19:15
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Watch the existing one become even more insufferable to push you into paying for the upgrade.
Thecla@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 21:02
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Will the existing ones still operate without the subscription?
sfxrlz@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 21:41
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What do you think ^^
ArtVandelay@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 22:34
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I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that
anarchyrabbit@lemmy.world
on 23 May 2024 06:32
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“Sorry, I don’t understand your question. Could you try again?”
selokichtli@lemmy.ml
on 22 May 2024 20:03
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I didn’t think people really expected to believe that their smart stuff was really theirs. Did they? Imagine renting your bulbs to Amazon.
teamevil@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 21:18
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Not having Amazon is great and cheaper than having it.
_sideffect@lemmy.world
on 22 May 2024 21:44
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Lmao, charge us for everything which was at first an incentive to buy your shit products
InternetUser2012@midwest.social
on 22 May 2024 23:27
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If I have to pay to have my dots and ring, i will throw the shit out in the street
Edit: Yeah, I’m done with them anyways, they’re trash.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 23 May 2024 06:28
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I will pay exactly zero dollars, thanks!
SomeGuy69@lemmy.world
on 23 May 2024 07:48
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Won’t last long. Free apps will ruin that Amazon subscription plan fast. One can already get a local and free chatAI and it’s already just a few clicks setup and I wouldn’t be surprised if these get made more easier for the mainstream any day. The tech is just too new, but were getting there soon.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
on 23 May 2024 07:53
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I wanna know how to flash the echoes to custom firmware. Then I’ll be set to migrate.
threaded - newest
With Sonos shitting the bed with its app update and now the prospect of Alexa being destroyed by fees and AI, my smart home infrastructure is falling apart. So disappointing.
This is why I went with HomeKit devices. I do not understand why people trust Amazon or Google, their business models are not pro-consumer.
If Apple pulled at one of the maneuvers these two have, there would be a flood of articles condemning them. No one expects Amazon or Google to respect you.
It’s why I’ve avoided anything smarthome tied to any particular vendor.
My endpoint devices are almost entirely Zwave or Zigbee/Matter based. I started out with a SmartThings hub but migrated it all to Home Assistant last year. HA has honestly had easier integrations than SmartThings did and supports almost anything under the sun.
I don’t have to worry about suddenly losing control of my devices and the only ‘subscription’ associated with it all is $15/year for a domain name to make setting up remote access easier. This approach requires a little more research, but it opens up the ability to mix and match devices however you’d like. Absolutely zero regrets.
Are you using microphones or is it entirely app based? And if so what microphones are you using?
I’m not currently, but I do know that HA has made specific pushes to improve voice-control over the past year. Should be numerous blog posts on their website about it.
It’s hilarious you think Apple is in any way pro-consumer. Apple is all about their walled gardens, but they’re a trap. Their entire business model is designed to use various underhanded means to entice you into their ecosystem and at every step make it increasingly difficult to escape it all so that they can keep extracting money from you. Google and Microsoft aren’t much better but they are better ironically because they’re not as good at disguising their bait and traps as Apple is.
I mean yeah. The only reason anyone is surprised when apple pulls shit like this is because they’re aggressively anti-consumer in their pricing and hardware design (parts pairing, poor reparability, etc.). People assume because they’re so flagrantly anti-consumer with their hardware, they can afford to not be so anti-consumer with their software. This is wrong, of course. They’re a publicly traded company, they’ll milk their users for every cent they can.
Yes. I understand the people who don’t use Apple products think they are smarter than those who do. Your list of common tropes is tiresome.
The reality is quite far from what you imagine. People who actually understand technology, people who are in the tech industry use Apple products at a higher rather than those who are not.
Instead of Apples well thought out walled garden, fools happily pay extra to play in Google/Amazon/Microsofts chain linked dirt pit. It’s hilarious what lengths people go to pretend that is a better experience; that rusty chain link with barbed wire is superior to walls
You will learn eventually
Never use anything that depends on the Internet for your smart home. There are entirely offline text to speech and voice recognition plugins/libraries for home assistant.
Yeah I learned this lesson by starting with Smartthings and grew to hate the lack of reliability pretty quickly. Home Assistant and a raspberry pi has been significantly better.
What are you using for microphones?
I too would like to change from Alexa echos to something else. But I don’t know what devices are readily with omni-directional mics and easy to migrate to. I use Alexa for simplicity but would gladly fill the gap with Home assistant and recommendations on good replacement mic/speakers.
Too bad we can’t root our Alexa equipment and use them.
It’s coming. Slowly. But it’s coming.
dragon863.github.io/blog/echoroot.html
I haven’t tried it myself (tho I’m planning to do so soon), but check Onju voice, it tries to do something kinda similar.
I hope someone tries do pull that on an echo dot. Good hardware, shit software.
Edit: Update with related links.
The Onju Github i forgot before, tho it’s linked in pcbway. It has instructions to set it up along with home assistant and even a matrix bridge.
Onju voice satellite is a different project using the same custom pcb. This one looks better integrated with home assistant and has an actual wakeword system (unlike og onju, which doesn’t have one by design). This one feels more like “better private alexa for home assistant”.
I can’t ask a question? I am in the Alexa infrastructure and would like to change and I don’t know what’s good to use instead. People are really shitty.
Don’t take it personally. It’s just a few trolls who think they’re superior. Your question is valid and I’m also interested in alternatives too. I have home assistant, but it’s another thing entirely to more easily swap out Alexa for some equally well supported mic/speaker hardware. I’m sure this will change with people being motivated not to give Amazon subscription fees and ‘to finally’ cut the online requirements. I would love local voice control so that I’m not reliant on phone apps if the internet goes out.
Is there good app support for Home Assistant? Like a one stop shop or is it spread over the apps of the various pieces of equipment?
Depends somewhat. Home Assistant has its own app that works pretty well. Generally other apps don’t integrate with Home Assistant, but rather the other way around with Home Assistant having a plug-in to allow it to control and interact with other hardware/software. Everything is controlled/managed by Home Assistant so when you need to issue commands or setup triggers its your one stop shop.
I know there are voice control plugins for Home Assistant that are reviewed reasonably well, but I don’t personally use them so I can’t say what models of mic work well or not. My usage is pretty minimal with simple timers and/or things like presence and temperature sensors being sufficient to meet all my automation needs supplemented by the occasional custom UI button on my Home Assistant dashboard accessible through the app or web interface. Personally the rule I try to follow for all my IoT devices is to avoid Wifi if at all possible in favor of standard mesh network tech like Zigbee or Z-Wave that way it’s literally impossible for my “smart devices” to call out to the Internet without me manually installing some kind of bridging software in Home Assistant.
Thank you so much for your detailed answer. This is going to be something I take a real look at.
So I got curious and did a little research. Home assistant itself provides several tutorials for setting up voice controls. There are several options to choose from. The simplest to get up and running seems like signing up for home assistant cloud and paying a monthly fee, although that’s also the least private and most costly option. At the other extreme you can go entirely DIY by picking up a cheap dev board for around $14, flashing it with ESPHome and hooking it up to your local voice assistant setup.
I haven’t personally used any of this as I’ve said previously, but everything I’ve read seems reasonable and it sounds like it’s the generally accepted way to go about doing these things with Home Assistant.
Edit: Reading the reviews of the ATOM Echo it seems like a lot of people complain about the mic and speaker quality and issues with it going into sleep mode. A more expensive but possibly better option might be one of the ESP32 S3 Box models flashed with ESPHome, although once again I have not personally used any of this so I can’t say whether the complaints about the ATOM Echo hold water or if the S3 Box is better. There also seems to be a Assist app for at least Android, so if you don’t want a dedicated hardware device you might be able to make do with just your phone.
Edit 2: This also looks like it might be a great option. It looks a little more polished and ready to go, and is supported by ESPHome.
Great information, thank you.
Home Assistant is a great alternative. It gets better and better as all Google and Alexa get worse and worse.
What are you using for microphones?
Why the downvotes? this is a legitimate good question as there are many available and people may have important experiences to share. Looking to set up my own someday (hopefully soon) and am interested in what has worked well for people as well.
Probably because they’ve asked it four times in this post
If only any of those questions had a legit answer D: I’m curious too.
Bluetooth and USB speakerphones seem to work fairly well as both mic and speaker. I think thr sennheiser sp20 has been in a couple tinkerers posts I’ve seen.
Alexa has had AI backing its services for the better part of a decade.
Source: I worked on some of it.
Not fees though.
I’m sorry Bill. I can’t open the pod bay door until you subscribe to Omni-zon
But I have to pee really bad HAL!!!
Looks like I’ll be selling the few Amazon Alexa-centric devices I’ve got.
Please don’t do that to other people…
I wonder how many fools are out there that will pay for this.
Too many, way, way too many,
The same amount of fools who created the largest civilian surveillance network with Ring doorbells.
And this is exact the reason I'm building a Home Assistant instance with local voice processing. Right now it takes a few seconds to process a request and take action on my crappy 1.8ghz laptop with only 4gb of RAM, but it basically does everything I use Alexa for. This announcement is just encouraging me to build a better server with an esp32 satellite.
What are you using for microphones?
I’m still working on question one too. It seems like a microphone array is the best option but a lot of them seem over built for the task.
Agreed. I can’t seem to find something that I can migrate to which doesn’t require a huge reprogramming effort. I would love local control but don’t want to spend my Saturdays and freetime struggling to figure out why it’s suddenly not working. Alexa is shitty and doesn’t have tons of flexible control, but it’s ‘uptime’ is very good, and does well for playing audio for the fam. self note… Get away from Spotify while I’m at it 😭
I don’t mind building the stuff when I’m in the mood. When Logitech decided to shut down the Harmony remote line I wrote my own version of a Hub into Home Assistant It was fun and it works better.
But now I’m tech support for it and if it breaks down I have to work on it whether I want to or not. It’s put me off wanting to build more stuff from scratch.
This is an instance where I think the folks at nobu casa (paid branch of home assistant development) could dedicate some resources to hardware. Instead of the prebuilt SBC stuff like HA-blue, or yellow or whatever. Create an esp device that just has a reliable microphone, and crank them out. I’d buy one for every room in my house!
I’ve got an esp army in my greenhouse that runs wLED, and one of them has a mic for doing the sound reactive display stuff, but it’s running wLED, not ESPHome… I wonder how easy it would be to just slap a digital mic on some of the other esp things I’ve got floating around?
I guess it would be too easy to just have Plug and Play option. 🤷 I am technically inclined but I don’t want to spend a ton of time recreating the wheel.
Honestly, nothing yet. I've only been playing with it for a few weeks. I just use the web interface on my phone to test the voice control. I've been looking at the esp32 devices that people have been building, but a lot of them admit that they can't come anywhere close to the reliability of the microphone array used in the Alexa.
I’m in the process of this now too. The only need that I can’t figure out within home-assistant assist, is unit conversions. Converting measurements when cooking is one of the main things we use the Alexa for these days.
Can it play music from YouTube or Spotify or something? Because that’s literally all my kids want an Alexa device for.
Yeah nah, not gonna pay for that
Just what the cash-strapped people of the world want - more monthly fees.
Looks like companies are shifting to charging users whose data they are stealing.
The saying ‘if you aren’t the customer, you are the product’ is outdated. Now you are the customer and the product!
Windows has done this for ages now. Buying a laptop, you pay well over $100 for the windows license alone, yet it is the most egregious operating system when it comes to datamining the user.
And then they started putting ads for subscriptions in the os.
And for something that is already data-mining you. Adding a fee just adds insult to injury.
Yeah, I think that's the bigger issue here. These devices pay their way by collecting data to sell off. What this "overhual" is indicating is that they haven't quite figured out how to make these devices not only pay for themselves, but also, generate a net background profit for the company.
The only thing I'm reading from this story is that Amazon is just aiming for more dollar signs from Alexia. I'm going tell you in the day and age of Siri and Whatever Google's thing is, this is going to backfire massively on Amazon. This will likely collapse whatever paltry Alexia that's out there. And I have a good feeling they'll look at this collapse as "well the technology just isn't a good money maker." No you idiots, it's not a mass profit driver. I get how something not drawing double digit percentage gains is a mystery to you all, but just because you cannot buy your fifteenth yacht from it, doesn't mean that the technology is a failure.
But it's whatever, Amazon's ship to wreck.
Well, once again a tech company gives a service I don’t care for an overhaul I don’t want and tries to charge a fee I won’t pay.
I suspect when this doesn’t do the numbers they want they’ll try adding a user fee to oxygen as a retaliation.
You should watch Spaceballs. They have Perri-Air.
And you could also look at the real world. We have boost air.
I am quite literally touching grass now, thank you very much.
That’ll be $15
I hope for one good thing to come out from all this AI madness : people might get used to pay for a service on the internet again. If this miraculously happens it could lead to people more cautiously choose services over quality instead of the one with darkest patterns.
One can still dream…
I wouldn't get your hopes up too high.
You're thinking like you are the customer and the customer is always right, so if you pay for a service it should provide you what you want, right?
This is not that scenario.
You are not the customer. You are a product that is being sold to advertisers. It does not matter if you also pay them money, you are still the product. If you pay them money on top of being sold then you are just an especially profitable product.
Paying them money will not cause you to cease being a product, no matter how much money you are willing to pay.
If you use a different company's product that starts off with you being the customer, eventually, they will learn that they can make more money by selling you to other people, and they will.
Yup. Any entity ties to Wall St. must make that $ line go higher every quarter. The how doesn’t matter.
I was more thinking that if people were paying they might give more thoughts to what they are diving into. But yeah I agree that’s just a wet dream.
Oh no! Where else will I find a Bluetooth speaker that also tells me the temperature outside?
Without datamining and that works out of the box? Please let us know when you find out.
Since it won’t come with my Prime sub, it’ll just get unplugged and thrown away.
Also, because the AI part.
.
Uhhh…it’s had AI backing it for most of the decade
I was never going to buy one of those, but now I have a second good reason to not want my conversations eavesdropped on
Watch the existing one become even more insufferable to push you into paying for the upgrade.
Will the existing ones still operate without the subscription?
What do you think ^^
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that
“Sorry, I don’t understand your question. Could you try again?”
I didn’t think people really expected to believe that their smart stuff was really theirs. Did they? Imagine renting your bulbs to Amazon.
Not having Amazon is great and cheaper than having it.
Lmao, charge us for everything which was at first an incentive to buy your shit products
If I have to pay to have my dots and ring, i will throw the shit out in the street
Edit: Yeah, I’m done with them anyways, they’re trash.
I will pay exactly zero dollars, thanks!
Won’t last long. Free apps will ruin that Amazon subscription plan fast. One can already get a local and free chatAI and it’s already just a few clicks setup and I wouldn’t be surprised if these get made more easier for the mainstream any day. The tech is just too new, but were getting there soon.
I wanna know how to flash the echoes to custom firmware. Then I’ll be set to migrate.