#Hardware requirements for Voice Assistant

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

visual rose
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I am planning on adding the voice assistant. I tried it before on a RPi 3b, but it did give troubles, probably also because of hardware limits. I also read that AI consumes a lot of the processor. Anyone here that can suggest hardware (preferable a RPI with maybe a hat).

night cypress
shy dock
visual rose
visual rose
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The price difference between the RPI's (4 and 5) is not that big. So I guess if it is a RPi I should go for the 5. I probably should also go for 8GB. And then maybe a SSD or NVMe is needed.
Or perhaps I shouldn't look at RPi's in the first place if that's just a bit too slow. But it's all just guessing for me.

night cypress
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The Dutch intents built into Home Assistant are 100% complete, meaning everything available in English is also accessible in Dutch. You probably won’t have any issues with local TTS in Dutch either. I can’t comment on STT, but as the saying goes, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” (In Hungarian, only the large model works, which requires a GPU unless you’re okay with waiting 30-40 seconds.)

However, AI is out of the question. For a normal processing speed, you need a GPU or a very powerful CPU and a lot of RAM. I gave up on it, especially since it’s far inferior to GPT-40-mini, which is both much cheaper and highly efficient (the electricity costs alone wouldn’t fit into the <$1 monthly budget).

visual rose
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Thank you for this clarification.
Ok, so let's forget the AI. Maybe in the future.
What would you recommend if I would only use TTS and what if I also want STT?

night cypress
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I recommend the Piper/Whisper combo locally. It even runs smoothly on a Raspberry Pi in English. If you’re considering a Pi, make sure to get the latest model, especially if the price difference isn’t significant.

If a cloud solution works for you, I personally use Azure TTS/STT and GPT-40-mini.

I also spent a lot of time figuring out what to buy, but in the end, I found refurbished Dell OptiPlex 5070 Tiny PCs and decided to go with those.

visual rose
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Thank you.
What amount of memory do you use in your PC? And do you think I need a SSD/NVMe?

shy dock
visual rose
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Ok, that's a good statement. Is SSD acceptable, or would you recommend to go for a NVme?

shy dock
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SSD is fine. Don't think it will be bottleneck on Pi5

compact sparrow
night cypress
compact sparrow
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I wouldn't use the cloud personally, but yes, easier to send to a beefy PC server.

night cypress
compact sparrow
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Meta have a small & highly multilingual model. They wrote a paper on it.

night cypress
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Yes, it's small and multilingual, but it needs a GPU 🙂 I played around quite a bit with Meta's Llama model.

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On a Raspberry Pi, local Hungarian speech recognition is like a dream. Even major phone manufacturers haven’t been able to solve this without an internet connection.

shy dock
compact sparrow
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I just get 8.47 tps on an S22 ultra. llama 3.1 3b q4_k, with the PocketPal app.

shy dock