Hey everyone,

A couple of years ago, I slowly started working on my Smart Home approach. I was working on having my forever home built, so I wanted to take my time to make all the right decisions and find what what worked for me. I came up with a short but important list of requirements. Whatever I chose, it would have to be,

  • Local-first ā€” I wanted to prioritize equipments that didnā€™t need internet access, and, even more importantly, didnā€™t rely on external servers. I wanted something that would either be very easy to block from the internet, or at the very least that would be easy for me to control what gets sent where.
  • Dumb-first ā€” A smart home should be first and foremost, a dumb home. Everything should work as a normal house would, so that, in case anything fails, things just work as a normal home would.
  • Wife-approved ā€” A smart home shouldnā€™t need a user guide. Whether itā€™s my wife, my daughter, or guests, the house should still work in a way that is intuitive for anyone other than me.

With that list, I quickly got to a decision ā€” a match made in heaven, Home Assistant and ZigBee devices. So, for over a year, I researched and bought devices that would fit my needs and I added smarts to my house. One thing never got sorted, though ā€” a good audio interface for the house.

Yes, I couldā€™ve just bought a Nest Mini or an Echo speaker, but that would break the first rule in ways I didnā€™t want to. Soā€¦ I just decided to wait until something came along that worked well with Home Assistant on a local level.

And I waited, and I waited. Until now.

Lady Luck has my back

A couple of months back, I was invited to a user research survey by Nabu Casa, the company that helps fund Home Assistant. This was a session about Privacy and I gladly participated. At the end, the interviewers asked me if I had any comments to the team and I said I really wanted them to release a voice assistant speaker.

By pure chance, the survey was actually to gather insights on Voice PE, Home Assistantā€™s new smart speaker, and, for my absolute delight, they decided to ship me one! Iā€™ve had the opportunity to try it out and while its name is ā€œPreview Editionā€, this product is simply amazing and I couldnā€™t be more excited to own it.

Since this is only now available for purchase (and still very hard to get), I thought it would be a neat idea to come up with a Ask Me Anything about the product and my smart home experience, as my very-first contribution to this Community. I may even write a review at a later date.

So, without further ado,

Ask Me Anything about the Voice PE!

    Menguelez

    Glad to be here! ;)

    Itā€™s somewhat similar to Alexa, but not quite. With Alexa, youā€™re stuck with a specific ecosystem and everything goes through Amazon. With this one, you can choose if you want to use it fully local ā€” by hosting your own speech to text and text to speech engines ā€” or use a cloud server. In my case, Iā€™m just testing stuff for the time being, but Iā€™m using ChatGPT as the conversation agent.

    This means that if I say something like ā€œItā€™s dark in hereā€, ChatGPT will look into my devices and turn on lights or open blinds from the room Iā€™m in.

    But whatā€™s really cool about it is that you donā€™t need to rely on external services or servers at all. I could also be running my own LLM (something like a local ChatGPT) or simply use speech to text and control the house with specific commands.