With voice assistants in trouble, Home Assistant starts a local alternative

Is cloud-based voice assistants a thing of the past? It's an overly dramatic question to ask if you look at the current state of millions of users of the three tech giants. Amazon has lost $10 billion a year on its voice assistants, which is why it has fired a large portion of the team. It's not at the "fire everyone" stage, but it is less interested in supporting the Assistant on third-party devices, which would be a huge blow to the company. The bubble is starting to seem like it is bursting because revenue never came for these systems.

There is a project with a heavy dependence on Big Tech voice assistants that isn't waiting for doom. Home assistant's year of voice will be in 2023 If these cloud voice assistants don't provide Big Tech with a multi-billion dollar revenue stream, that's fine, we'll do it ourselves! The Home Assistant team has proven it can manage a big project, despite the fact that there are a few open source voice assistant projects out there. This is the new leader for a viable local voice service because it has enough revenue to have full time employees.

Plus Home Assistant isn't starting from scratch—it went and found what it called the "most promising" open source voice assistant out there, "Rhasspy," and hired the lead developer, Mike Hansen, to work full-time on voice in Home Assistant. Hasen will now work at Nabu Casa, the Home Assistant's commercialization company. According to Home Assistant's founder, Paulus Schoutsen, "Rhasspy stands out from other open source voice projects because Mike doesn’t focus on just English. Instead, his goal is to make it work for everyone. This is going great as Rhasspy supports already 16 different languages today." The plan is to support all 62 languages the Home Assistant currently supports, but with voice, all without needing an Internet connection.

Home Assistant will limit the number of possible actions and focus on the basics of interacting with your smart home, according to Schoutsen. Web searches, calls, and voice games are not allowed. It will probably be possible for the Home Assistant community to add more features to it, and then it will be able to imitate Hal 9000 and do a million other things.

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Big Tech voice services don't have a way to make money. Nobody wants a subscription service because they don't have a way to show ads. The server time needed to process all that voice communication leads to an ongoing cost. The problem was worsened by the sale of their voice hardware at a cost in an attempt to win the voice assistant rush while hoping for an additional revenue stream later. In retrospect, the $350 price tag for Apple's high-end speaker, the HomePod, looks a lot more sustainable than it did when it was first released.

Google seemingly tried to solve this problem with its second-generation voice speakers, which moved "some" voice processing to local chips. Moving some voice processing off the cloud will cut down on server time, but it's unclear if that's enough to meet Google's incredibly high standards for continuing product support.

If you move a voice assistant into a host-it-yourself environment, you won't have to worry about the weird, shifting priorities of a Big Tech environment. There will probably be more than one advantage. It will feel less like you're running an always-listening internet wiretap in your home if you have a local voice assistant. Home Assistant has shown that it is possible to keep all the local results in a much faster experience for your smart home.

The Home Assistant already has a text-only " Conversation " command system so it's a matter of wiring it up to voice input and output. The hardware solution beyond the usual "pile of wires and circuit boards" that usually dominates open source smart home projects is not clear. There is a selection of good looking speaker/microphone combo that you can spread around the house without looking like a crazy scientist. The Home Assistant's commercialization company, Nabu Casa, is trying to close the hardware gap by making plug-and-play server boxes and dongles. It might be able to launch a speaker.