Home Assistant is getting a voice assistant. A new project by its founder, Paulus Schoutsen, will allow voice commands to control smart devices without needing to connect to a cloud. Sometime in 2023, the voice assistant is expected to be available.
Nabu Casa is a company that provides first-party cloud services for Home Assistant and contributes to the development of the free platform. It is also making the Yellow out-of-box hardware solution that can run Home Assistant in your home without the need to build one on a computer.
Web searches, making calls, and voice games are not allowed.
Nabu Casa needed a developer with experience to lead the project to build a voice assistant. Rhasspy is an open-sourced voice assistant backed by its own community that integrates the tech into whatever solution they're trying to build.
One of Nabu Casa's main priorities is to work with multiple languages. Schoutsen wants the community to help get Home Assistant to support all the languages.
The Home Assistant won't be able to do things that a smart speaker would do. Schoutsen says that they will limit the number of possible actions and focus on the basics of interacting with your smart home. Web searches, calls, and voice games are not allowed. Definitely no 'by the way'.
Leading companies spend a lot of money on voice assistant products.
Voice assistants have internet- connected functions that are great at answering questions, checking sports scores, and so on. If you don't need a smart home controller, the ability to know it all, and do it all, can be hard to achieve. The easiest and fastest voice assistant for home commands is Apple's, but it requires an internet connection to work, whereas Home Assistant will be completely local. If you're all-in on Apple's HomeKit, Matter support will make all devices work with each other.
Home Assistant will be able to use its own voice assistant in the future to control devices it has brought together to one platform. Schoutsen mentions that a new intents repository is being created to help the community program their own actions, and that the platform already has conversation integration that understands text-based speech.
Amazon, which laid off thousands of employees last month, is said to have suffered the biggest cuts in its voice assistant division. The ongoing server costs to run their voice hardware can be financially draining, even though they sold it at a cost to quickly increase their assistants install base.
A Home Assistant-based smart home doesn't need the cloud, is open-sourced with a community behind it, and will have optional turn-key hardware if you're not big on programming things yourself. We don't know if it will work as well as the big-tech voice solutions.
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