My home assistant voice preview just arrived! I’m following the installation instructions, but the home assistant app is stuck at “scanning for servers”. The installation instructions don’t mention this. Do I need to setup a server on my home network first? I thought the device was self-contained, so I wouldn’t need a raspberry pi or anything alongside it.
#Setting up my new voice preview
tranquil compass
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The device is basically only a microphone and speaker - you will need a dedicated device for home assistant
paper tusk
And most likely some sort of LLM, either paid or locally hosted, if you want more than basic controls.
tranquil compass
Got it. Perhaps I read the announcement too quickly, as I got the impression it was a plug-and-play replacement for commercial voice assistants. I’ll do some more research to look for recommended specs and buy a device for a server. Thanks for confirming.
paper tusk
Got it. Perhaps I read the announcement too quickly, as I got the impression it ...
Let me know if you need any help, i'd be glad to help!
tranquil compass
Let me know if you need any help, i'd be glad to help!
Thanks @paper tusk ! Just debating between the Green and the Yellow. Though I'm thinking maybe I should try running it on my old macbook first (assuming I can get it to be always-on), just to get a feel for what's possible and what I'll want to do with it.
paper tusk
Thanks <@156149779443875840> ! Just debating between the Green and the Yellow. T...
Most of us start with existing hardware.
I myself used an old Poweredge at first. but many use laptops.
Just make sure that your laptop is Intel x86/64 and not ARM
tranquil compass
Okay thanks, that's helpful
And if I do graduate to hardware, it looks like the green is pretty comparable with the yellow; the main difference being that the yellow could allow me to upgrade the memory and storage, and is matter-ready, whereas the green requires a usb dongle add-on if I need matter compatibility. Have I got that right, or are there other advantages to the yellow?
dry wave
The green is supposed to be the easiest entry into the homeassistant eco system offering a low power solution that is very easy to setup. The yellow offers a couple more customization options with slightly more powerful hardware and additional radios.
Neither is a great solution if you intend to use the voice pe with local processing as they arent all that powerful. But the yellow would be the better choice of them both for this usecase in terms of performance.
tranquil compass
Interesting. I don’t suppose there are minimum specs listed anywhere for local processing?
dry wave
The website calls it "powerful" hardware which is probably a rather accurate description. Theoretically the tools for speech to text and text to speech support smallish models that can run somewhat on a pi 4 with reasonable memory size (eq to the yellow).
Personally if you were to go with the yellow, I would recommend picking the compute model 5 (pi 5).
It would be better to pick some more capable compute like a mini pc with an N100 cpu or similar or at best something with a dedicated nvidia gpu. But that is a lot more pricy
tranquil compass
Ah okay, yeah I assumed a gpu would be needed for any reasonable performance
But all right, that’s really helpful, thank you
I’ got it going on my (extremely noisy) old MacBook last night, and wired up ChatGPT to it (which I appreciate is very much not local processing), and it was amazing how quickly it blew Alexa out of the water with just that feature! Looking forward to playing around more with it.
dry wave
It is quite nice yea
Have a look at customizing the entities exposed to assistant as that can be used to set up proper aliases and limit those to only the ones important to you. Makes it better and faster
tranquil compass
I’ve got to actually buy some smart home devices first 😬
dry wave
smart plugs and bulbs bring all the fun of power monitoring and cozy vibes
everyone loves a good graph ^^