Text summary of the State of the Open Home stream.
Home Assistant is a beacon of light in the constant shitification of services and the internet.
As someone who knows nothing about them I was really hoping OpenHomes was a opensource project to virtually design the home you like using Sims like front end but CAD software backend to ensure structural integrity. Which then you can rent a 3D home printer from a list of non profit companies who help people build affordable housing to drop the printer by and give tips on how to plan ahead for things like plumbing/electrical/network/sewage/insulation needs.
I was 20 meters up a tree reaching the clouds before I started reading the truth
I’ve been using Home Assistant for a couple of years (from memory I think it was soon after joining Lemmy I was convinced to set it up), and I have to say they have made great progress. It’s amazing to see them double their active installations from 1 to 2 million in one year, that’s awesome for what feels like a very niche product.
The progress on voice in particular is amazing. With a Voice preview, OpenAI, and Music Assist, my kids can start music where they only know some words and not the name of the song.
The only complaint is wake word detection isn’t great with our accent. My wife swears it’s sexist, she thinks it only listens if she puts on a male voice 😅
I don’t know if Home Assistant is so niche. Everyone who does some form of smart home comes to the point where there are several manufacturers forcing you to use their own app. If you’re lucky you can use something like Google Home or Siri to have a unified control interface, but these are usually very basic. You can try to stick to one system for as long as possible, but sooner or later that will fail. A system like Home Assistant is the inevitable solution to these problems and it is a very good thing that HA exists as a strong and open software to solve this problem.
I tend to find we more tech savvy people vastly overestimate how tech savvy the average person is.
However, I suspect you are right about the people interested in home automation eventually hitting that point and coming across Home Assistant.
Home Assistant have done a great job reducing the barrier to entry. Significant improvements in UI editors and all but removing the need for any YAML config for an average user. Plus the Home Assistant Yellow and Green meaning you no longer need to know how to set up a server and can instead buy a hub off the shelf. Surely these efforts are a big part of why the number of installations has increased so much.
I’m really hopeful about how MusicAssistant will improve after reading this. I’ve got the voice blueprint set up, but am personally not wild about needing to use OpenAI for it to work well. I’d love to see some built-in intents for it. I have to say that building automations with custom sentences is very cool and relatively easy.
As I understand it you can also use a locally running LLM. But that requires power my Raspberry Pi 4 doesn’t have.
I’m not sure if Music Assistant has the capability yet, but I presume you could have a no-LLM version if you could trigger a search and to play the first song found.
Music assistant has Spotify connect integration, so if you have a Spotify connect device, maybe you can use voice command -> regular Spotify Integration -> music assistant Spotify connect device?
Yeah perhaps. I don’t have a Spotify connect device so can’t try it.
I quite like having the LLM, and listening to all the weird questions the kids ask.
Yeah, I’m in the same boat RE capability to actually run an LLM.
