Changing from Alexa/Google to HA

[stoic gyro]

I am so new it's mind boggling.

We have used Alexa for years, named our Alexa Show DemonDot. However, really really want to change to Home Assistant without giving up the ability to use Voice "commands". Of course, our Google TV has its Google Assistant thing.

What equipment do I need right at the start to ditch DemonDot and her cohorts for HA?

PS: I did see an HA app on our TV so it looks like the seamless visual assists I want (homestead camera monitoring, front doorbells, etc. is doable on the TV).

I won't be offended if you talk to me like I'm a Village Idiot 'cuz on this stuff I kinda am.

[reef drift]

So you have to understand that a voice setup with home assistant is not going to be as polished as something from one of the big tech platforms.
A setup really depends on how "intelligent" you want/need it to be, what hardware you are running your server on, if you want fully local vs using some cloud services. and some other stuff.

I don't want to information overload you, but its important to set expectations when discussing voice. it is not really a "drop in replacement" at thios time however with a bit of work it can get pretty good.

[stoic gyro]

Ideally, if someone rings the video doorbell on my reptile room door, I can say "Show Snek Shack door" or something to that effect or if in the house can say, "Dim the lights in living room", turn them off etc.

It doesn't have to process horribly complex commands or even talk back. Just say the words and it does the thing.

I am looking at starting out by putting HA on my old Lenovo Legion laptop and go from there. I've considered trying to set-up a home server, but that might be beyond this 68 year old brain.

PS: I was also looking at that voice module thing on the HA site... wasn't sure if it was a standalone like the Green or not. If not, am okay with getting both.

[reef drift]

for some basic commands like that it is pretty easy to get working.
an old laptop is not a bad place to start to do some testing and find your feet a bit.
The green is a low power server hardware.
The Voice-PE is not stand alone as it needs a HA server to run, it is a "voice sattelite" which acts as the edge device for the "voice pipeline" on your server.
so a green and a VPE will give you a server and a voice sattelite
the green is capable of running a very basic pipeline by itself using what is called "speech to phrase" but its limited to very basic (or manually set up) commands and cant handle wildcard inputs and stuff.
if you want a more "intelligent" system then you could add other services to full speech to text and have more of a "brain"

As mentioned above, This is actually pretty tricky to explain without a pretty large dump of information.
A green and a VPE is a great place to start and once you get the hang of the basics you can grow from there.

[stoic gyro]

A starting place is all I need. With that, I can do more research, look at apps and that sort of thing. I saw an HA app on my Google TV, but I don't know yet if it's a genuine HA thing yet. We'll see as time goes.

Thank you so much for the info. Am okay with Info Dumps as long as the language is simple 😉 LOL

[reef drift]

This video explains a lot about the voice pipeline stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6VvzDSI8RU

its mostly about speech-to-phrase but it also covers how stuff works under the hood

The basic thing is: wakeword -> STT -> assist processing -> TTS
each step has various things around it.