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 — I wanted to prioritize equipments that didn’t need internet access, and, even more importantly, didn’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 — 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 — A smart home shouldn’t need a user guide. Whether it’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 — 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 — a good audio interface for the house.
Yes, I could’ve just bought a Nest Mini or an Echo speaker, but that would break the first rule in ways I didn’t want to. So… 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 Assistant’s new smart speaker, and, for my absolute delight, they decided to ship me one! I’ve had the opportunity to try it out and while its name is “Preview Edition”, this product is simply amazing and I couldn’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!
