- Home Assistant is now part of the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit aiming to fight against surveillance capitalism and offer privacy, choice, and sustainability.
- The foundation will own and govern all Home Assistant entities, including the cloud, and has plans for new hardware and AI integration.
- Home Assistant aims to become a mainstream smart home option with a focus on privacy and user control, while also expanding partnerships and certifications.
I’ve dabbled a little with it, but I really want something that’s as easy to use & set up as the commercial offerings like Google Home and Amazon Echo. I want to have an interface where I can connect my light bulbs, and have little hockey pucks that will listen for a wake word and do what I ask of it, and play my music. I also want to be able to get under the covers and do something that solves an odd problem that might come up.
I’m very hopeful for the project and I do think it will get there eventually.
The problem is that commercial entities have the leverage to get hardware makers to design stuff for their environnement. It’s the same issue Linux has vs. Windows. Mostly, it works great when you use things that conform to standards. But sometimes you’ll hit an edge case. All in all, it’s a small price to pay.
Sure, but if I had a Pi (or similar board) with a speaker and a mic, I’d hope to be able to do the same thing. A Pi Zero would definitely be able to do the job.
Hopefully, home assistant will get big enough that they will be impossible to ignore. With an estimated 1 million installs currently running worldwide, they’re probably not there yet. At 5m though? Probably. 10m? Definitely.
They’ve mostly got the hardware right now and are developing more. A more mobile friendly and noob friendly unboarding process is really all they need.
Isn’t that something like what this product is solving for? https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-S3-BOX-3
You can get your smart speaker and wake words with this. Integration with a voice recognition model and home assistant and you’re golden.
I’ll take a look at that, thanks. It’s been a year or so since I last looked at it but back then there was a push button that you could use but I couldn’t get it going.
Check out the FutureProofHomes youtube channel. He’s developing a better presence/speaker puck, but the previous episodes get you something like an Alexa experience with voice assist. There’s also a good thread in the HA forums about voice assist hardware ideas set up as a contest.
Thanks, I will definitely check out both of those
They’re working on a smart speaker. Says so in this very article.
Yeah, that’s why I said I’m very hopeful. It says so in my comment.