I was a heavy voice user of the old Google Assistant, as well as Google Home/Nest speakers, and have really grown to hate its Gemini based replacement on my phone. So often it screws up with basic commands that were intuitive and reliable on the old Assistant. It’s also slower and feels like a waste of resources to query an LLM for simple device and smart home commands
I have been fiddling with Home Assistant’s voice command solution. Because I have it running on raspberry pi, it is not fast enough to process commands efficiently, but I am probably going to move it to an old desktop I’ve been using as a home server and see if it runs faster.
Nabu Casa subscription would get you their voice processing which works well. I would trust them way, way ahead of Google for privacy even if it isn’t self-hosted for the voice processing.
They are also working on getting whisper working better locally, that’s a priority for them. The subscription is basically to support HA in general, because they work very hard at not enshittifying the Home Assistant environment.
That’s a good point. Can I still self host on my domain while also using their cloud for voice processing?
Yes, you just set the STT in the voice setup to the home asst cloud.