For those of us still impatiently waiting, what is your experience so far with “Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition”?

—- I ordered just 2 hours in but the vendor I used sold out in 21 minutes. I just found out I also missed the restock, so hopefully some time next month.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1024 hours ago

    I don’t want my comment to come off negative towards the product because my experience has less to do with the speaker itself in more to do with my expectations but i’m less than impressed with it at the moment.

    I was watching the live stream and bought one the moment they said sales were live, took about a week to get in. Having never used assist within home assistant before i thought at the very least i could say “turn off the kitchen” and the software would know there was a room called kitchen and turn anything off in it. Nope.

    I will eventually get around to setting up my own local llm once i get the right hardware but i don’t understand all these people “glad to drop alexa and google” just to feed their data into a public online llm. Feels worse to me in some ways.

    Currently it lives in my bedroom and the speaker is a bit to tin/treb to work for our sound machine but a $10 aux speaker did well enough with that. I had to manually plug phrases i want it to do into an automation but once i did that everything worked fine. At the end of the day, though, if i’m using an additional speaker i don’t understand why i should pay $60 for this when i could get the components and diy one for less than $35.

    • @ikidd
      link
      English
      515 hours ago

      In the end, I guess I trust Nabu Casa infinitely more than Google/Amazon. I’ll do without if it means having their wiretaps in my house. At least HA is trying to give us local voice assist. That was never going to happen with the others.