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 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.