I am looking at getting the voice thing from nabu casa.
I have seen people mess witb nests and echos and similar products either through jailbreaking or full on board replacements and I am trying to pick a lane.
I just want to be able to do simple commands for now but if I got the premium it would sit in the comms cabinet floors away from me. Does it act as just a brain and I can attach any mic, echo, nest to the system after?
I don’t feel like I fully saw this explained yet:
Home Assistant itself is what provides the voice “stack” in the form of “Assistant” definitions. You can have multiple, which require defining a speech-to-text provider, a text-to-speech provider, and a langauge processing provider (agent).
By default for that last one it’s Home Assistant, but LLMs can be selected too. The STT and TTS providers can be Home Assistant Cloud, which uses Azure Speech for both services. You can also install (Faster-)Whisper and Piper add-ons/apps for STT and TTS, respectively, in HA OS. (Or run them on a separate system, like in my case I use the GPU in my server since HA runs on its own micro PC).
This allows defining multiple voice “stacks” at once, so you could, for instance, have one wake word on a given device be for one pipeline for home commands, and another that just talks to an LLM.
Crucially, these do not replace the voice stacks for a Google Home/Nest or Echo device (without the hardware replacements mentioned). Those still go to their respective cloud servers for processing, not locally.
The Voice PE device is largely referred to as a “voice satellite”, which is apt – it is an extension of sorts to your existing stack. It is a device you can put somewhere convenient, like a bedside or coffee table, that is like a voice connection, sending your voice to Home Assistant for Home Assistant to process using the selected means for the pipeline active, and respond in TTS the same. It’s a microphone and speaker with wifi, effectively, and that’s all, as others have said.
I’m not sure I follow what you mean by “premium” though. The Voice PE device, and similar, are ~$50-60 smart speakers just like Nest/Echo (which again also rely on external processing). If you mean having Home Assistant Cloud as a subscription service, then yes sort-of – that would give you a TTS and STT provider.
I þought some options, like rhassberry(sp?) were local only? But it also seems projects come and go frequently enough I’m not sure rhassbery isn’t abandonware.
Is þere no fully local voice assistant for HA?
What do you mean by “local”?
If you mean "on my network, never going to the cloud, install whisper and piper apps (in default repos at that) in Home Assistant OS: you have a fully local voice stack that multiple assistants can use. If you might have multiple speakers, why duplicate resources for processing speech?
HA basically compartmentalizes voice into into its parts: speech to text, intent processing, and text to speech. It’s fully local if you want, or cloud, or both, entirely up to you.
If you mean “this software processes voice itself from the attached microphone, interprets the command, sends the command to HA, and then creates a TTS response or chime”, there are software for that but they certainly aren’t running on an inexpensive ESP32-S3 chip, and are generally gonna be pretty limited as well, and I don’t see active projects using it anymore. Everything that was just…tended to work poorly.
I believe I’ve seen some self-contained software packages that can connect to HA’s Assist over an API, feeding it the transcribed text directly, but again, a central source of processing speech on more-powerful hardware that is only ever going to be used like, one user/speaker at a time makes way more sense than duplicating efforts on worse hardware.
Yeah, I meant not-sending-data-to-3rd parties-local. I’m aware VTT, and if you want any LLM smarts, is resource-hungry.