I think that the pipeline they made for managing voice chat is a great framework - specifically how you can point it to either local systems, their cloud, or third party systems is awesome.
I also think that while they are the champions of home automaton, they are playing catch-up on the voice assistant side.
On the whole I believe they still want to achieve on-prem voice, but the tech to do that is still being baked, and they’re not a Google or an Amazon, so they don’t have the money to be first in line.
I did set up a local LLM on a pretty beefy machine and Whisper to do local voice assistance, but it kept falling apart. The only one that worked reasonably was tying it to a commercial API. This was more than a year ago, so things might have improved.
But if they want to sell these things as an Alexa/Google Home alternative, they’ll have a hell of a story if they built a one-stop hub that ran an on-device model and did everything locally. There are a lot of smaller models now and companies like MediaTek make decent edge-processors with beefy NPUs.
I’m still a big fan of their approach. Sad to see them drop the yellow, but I hope it means they’ll come out with something better.
I think that the pipeline they made for managing voice chat is a great framework - specifically how you can point it to either local systems, their cloud, or third party systems is awesome.
I also think that while they are the champions of home automaton, they are playing catch-up on the voice assistant side.
On the whole I believe they still want to achieve on-prem voice, but the tech to do that is still being baked, and they’re not a Google or an Amazon, so they don’t have the money to be first in line.
I did set up a local LLM on a pretty beefy machine and Whisper to do local voice assistance, but it kept falling apart. The only one that worked reasonably was tying it to a commercial API. This was more than a year ago, so things might have improved.
But if they want to sell these things as an Alexa/Google Home alternative, they’ll have a hell of a story if they built a one-stop hub that ran an on-device model and did everything locally. There are a lot of smaller models now and companies like MediaTek make decent edge-processors with beefy NPUs.
I’m still a big fan of their approach. Sad to see them drop the yellow, but I hope it means they’ll come out with something better.