• Is this voice assistant something I can install on Android? I didn’t realize there was any alternative to Google or Siri (or Bixby).

  • 10 hours

    I’m sure it’s a decent product, but only 30 days warranty?? They must not have a lot of faith in their product. That’s not even legal in a lot of countries (at least the EU, Australia, New Zealand, and some Asian countries).

    • (Re)pebble smartwatches also have only 30 days long warranties… https://repebble.com/warranty

      Here’s a quote from one of their blog posts: https://repebble.com/blog/pebble-time-2-is-in-mass-production

      We offer a 30-day warranty. We will ship you a replacement during that period if you encounter any hardware defects and return it . We think this is a fantastic watch, and we stand behind it. But we can’t stand up behind it forever - life happens. We’re also a much smaller company than before. We can’t afford to bring these new watches to market unless we can contain our exposure to risk. To balance that, we’re clearly stating our terms in the interest of being as transparent as possible, enabling you to make an informed decision.

      We don’t offer buyer’s remorse refunds. The information about what Pebble is and does has been around for 14 years now. You all should have a pretty good idea of what the product is and whether you want it. It’s also very hard to do reverse logistics worldwide (ie getting watches returned). If you don’t want a Pebble, please don’t order one 😉.

      I find that disappointing and I’m honestly confused about how that checks out legally in EU.

      E: I like how AirGradient approached this where you get parts for DIY kit (which is practically almost fully assembled and it’s just formality to do the finishing screws) where you get no warranty but at a much cheaper price in return and the risk is on you: https://www.airgradient.com/indoor/

      The monitor with warranty is 230 USD and the kit without warranty is 138 USD.

      • I’m pretty sure you just get a 30 day return period in the EU, regardless of your reason.

        While I don’t fully agree with this (online shopping should not be encouraged, especially multiple round-trips for some clothes that you ordered in the wrong size), it is the law.

        We don’t offer buyer’s remorse refunds

        they most certainly do, or will when you threaten to report them.

    • The 30 day warranty seems to be default for them, all their products are only given 30 day warranty. Super shitty and like you mention illegal many places.

      • Basically all their products are essentially dev kits. They are not meant for normal consumers. At least thwts how it has been for the phone, laptop, watch, etc.

        • The PineTime works great as a regular device as well! I did do a little dev’ing to get the weather to show in a watchface that hadn’t been updated to include it yet, but other than that it’s a solid device imo.

          • Sure, but they wouldnt exist without that. Making micro batches of specialized hardware is not profitable at all. Offering a real warranty would immediately bankrupt them. If they sold more than a few thousand devices per model then i would care, but meanwhile big manufacturers get away with so much worse.

      • @ExcessShiv
        In europe there is a big difference between the manufacturers waranty that is up to the manufacturer to offer or not to offer as he likes and the legal waranty that is an obligation for the seller that he cannot escape.
        So in europe the customer always holds the reseller responsible and not the manufacturer.

        • When the manufacturer is the seller, they’re still bound to the legal minimum requirements of warranty though.

  • 11 hours

    Very cool!

    The voice sattelites like this and the Home Assistant voice from a year back are great and I love seeing more options for self hosted fully local devices like this.

    But honestly, what I find is missing for a fully local smart home setup is a “brain” for running the assistant LLM in a simple way.

    There is plenty of cloud solutions for connecting AI, but true local hosting requires a rig with a proper GPU if you want timely responses. I wonder if it is possible to build a purpose built “brain box” for Home Assistant that is small, not too expensive, fully local.

    It just sucks needing a rig with a RTX 3090 or whatever to get the full chain to run fully local. Small LLMs are stupid as dirt and our Home Assistant Green is in no way equipped to handle any form of LLM. I managed to get my gaming rig to host an LLM that was good enough, but I don’t want my gaming rig to be always on, and if I start gaming on it, the GPU has to deallocate all LLM business.

    I love fully local stuff, but the LLM part seems very expensive. Even for such a simple thing as managing our lights and music.

    • I love fully local stuff, but the LLM part seems very expensive. Even for such a simple thing as managing our lights and music.

      Yeah, this is something I found out when I hacked my Amazon Echo and put LineageOS on it. I like the new interface that isn’t constantly advertising Amazon bullshit as a screensaver, but it doesn’t have a GPU, so attempting to put any sort of voice component takes many seconds to try to process.

      And in this post-memory-crisis economy, it’s not quite the right time to buy a dedicated LLM processing rig for my house. But, this really needs to be the route in the future. Or just install a NPU on this speaker itself. Phones already do this, and it’s been the standard since 2017.

    • I’m thinking the same thing. I hate the idle power draw of my home server and want to migrate back to arm but have the x86 as a fallback node for games in whales and jellyfin transcodes, but it just doesn’t make sense to wake and sleep constantly for speech recognition.

    • 11 hours

      I love fully local stuff, but the LLM part seems very expensive. Even for such a simple thing as managing our lights and music.

      So, the simple things should just be voice command (not recognition, limited vocabulary), <wakeword> kitchen light on, what’s todays weather (assuming you automatically download it and have it there, needs TTS like whisper). That can run on a recent potato. Somewhat more complex things need full voice recognition e.g. Play me x songname by y artist. Laptop CPU should handle that fine. You’ll only need a full LLM for more general inquiries, e.g.<wakeword> What mess has Trump made today?, which will need web access seeing as small LLMs don’t have a lot of world knowledge (although you can self host Wikipedia and point it at that).

      If you have a desktop computer and a GPU with 16+GB VRAM (or even smaller using RAM and a MoE LLM) that’ll do the job with reasonable smarts e.g. Qwen 3.6 35BA3B, Gemma 4 12B or 26BA4B. You may have to wait a minute or two. Mine pulls around 55W at idle (7800XT) and does double duty as a NAS and gaming rig, or you can have it sleep most of the time and let the laptop wake it up when necessary.

      • 4 hours

        <wake word> “how much is using local LLMs for trivial things raising world wide energy usage and causing a RAM shortage?”

      • I actually have things like “play x by y” functioning really well without a LLM.

        Have a custom service that exports all song/album/artist names from MusicAssistant, does some simple cleanup, and places the list where HomeAssistant expects it for custom voice intents. Then this: https://github.com/charludo/hass-closest-intent is enough that imperfect STT can still easily be matched to those song/artist/… names.

    • 8 hours

      Get a Strix Halo box to be your headless AI server

      They’re around 4k USD these days though…

      • 5 hours

        At this price point, there are also DHX Spark on the Nvidia side… I don’t know how they compare, though. Our software tech lead got one at work to test if it can reduce cloud expenses!

        • 5 hours

          I tried to get a Asus GX10 (DGX Spark from Asus), first unit was boot looping, replacement got through OOBE then failed to mount the drive and kernel panicked.

          I got my money back.

          • 5 hours

            Oh, good to know! I’m currently running AI stuff on my RTX3070 and it barely fast enough to be acceptable…

            However it’s nice to be able to ask HA to “turn off the lights close to the TV” without having to be hyper specific!

    • 11 hours

      I’m working on this exact problem at home now, and finding 24GB of ddr4, a 6th-gen i7, and an old 8GB rx580 is more than enough to run pretty capable models up to ~35B parameters just fine, and equivalent MoE models shockingly fast. Not exactly cheap, with the price of everything so crazy right now, but certainly cheaper altogether than I’d imagined.

  • If it keeps playback functionality only on LAN then it could be a good replacement for the Google Home units I have stashed around that constantly need to ping home even for basic local playback.

  • The Third Reality speaker also recently came out.

    So now there are three. The Pine one, the Home Assistant one, and the third Reality one.

    • 6 hours

      The home assistant one (Voice PE) works very well as a front for conversational home control, but poorly for music (although to be fair it does include a headphone jack).

      This pine one seems larger, so maybe they’re doing better here with the speaker.

  • Oh hell yeah. I am all for this. Might be the push I need to finally setup HA.