this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 156 points 9 months ago (17 children)

The problem I have always had with voice control is that it just doesn't really seem to fit into my home automation. I don't want to give Home Assistant a verbal command to turn on the lights. I want it to detect that I've entered the room and set the lights to the appropriate scene automatically; I haven't touched a light switch in weeks. For selecting an album or movie to play, it's easier to use a menu on a screen than to try to explain it verbally.

Don't get me wrong. I'm hugely in favor of anything that runs locally instead of using the "cloud." I think that the majority of people running a home automation server want to tinker with it and streamline it to do things on its own. I want it to "read my mind." The people who just want a basic solution probably aren't going to set up HA.

Maybe I'm missing a use case for voice control?

[–] [email protected] 65 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Funny...I'm the exact opposite. I don't want it to detect that I’ve entered the room and set the lights to the appropriate scene automatically. Unless it can detect when I don't want to go into a dark room and be blinded by lights I didn't want on, I want to control when it turns on. Unless it can determine that I'm only home from work for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, I don't want it to adjust the heat settings. In other words, until it can actually read my mind, I want to be able to control it and tell it what I want when I actually want it.

I'm looking into an HA setup specifically to get away from Alexa and host everything locally. I may only want simple controls, but I want to truly control everything myself.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

I loved being able to control the dimmer level or color of the lights using voices controls.

I set up a few IFTTT recipes to create lighting and music scenes for things like reading, conversation, movie watching, date night, party time, and a few others and triggered them with a voice command.

It was always a hit with whoever I brought over, but mostly it just did 4 or 5 things with one voice command.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You can have it set more intelligently than on/off.

For example, what I have (I'm excessive btw, so this is just one option) is a light sensor that tells me how light it is outside, and then combine that information with sunrise/sunset times.

I use that to set the color of the lighting (circadian lighting style), the light level, and a ramp time to the max brightness I'd want. For rooms where there is good daylight coming in, if the light coming in from daylight is bright enough, the lights lower their brightness (daylight harvesting approach).

This isn't in every room at the moment, as some of my lights are not RGBW LEDs. Those with regular white LEDs just dim.

Is it perfectly set for your eyes? No, but you can tweak it. My wife likes it bright than me, so I set values that I could tolerate for a nice compromise.

No RGB? Then drop the circadian lighting, keep the rest.

No light sensors? There are some APIs available out there for solar radiation values you can use (openweathermap for example). Less accurate, but probably close enough for what you want.

TL;DR version: add more conditions, and get what you want.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You wake up one day with a bad headache, and bright light hurts your eyes. You can close the curtains, but every room is set to turn the lights on to the brightness that you usually prefer.

How do you manage something like this? Do you have to adjust everything with your phone and reset it when you feel better?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Same here.

  • I have no idea how to reliably sense who or how many people are in a room, going by questions here. The presence sensors I’ve tried so far are really inadequate
  • even if I knew who or how many are in the room, I have no idea if there is any logic to correctly decide whether I want the light on and how much
  • voice control of lights is more useful to me, although Alexa is slow and I haven’t yet tried other approaches
  • scheduled lighting has been surprisingly useful. That reminds me, I need to schedule dining room at 20% at 6am m,w,f
[–] TheWozardOfIz 19 points 9 months ago

My main use cases are Timers in Kitchen, Finding my wife's phone, and turning off music.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

My main use case for voice is for things that I haven't been able to (reasonably) automate. For a couple of examples:

  1. Saying "turn on the TV" as I'm grabbing lunch and walking across the room
  2. "Turn on/off the stars" for bedroom mood lighting
  3. "Timer for x" is honestly probably the most used things.

It's all fairly trivial stuff to do manually but I think that's probably true for the vast majority of home automation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Try "start Netflix on the TV". Should work for most services. (At least it does with Chromecast and Home Assistant).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Even ignoring privacy arguments, I think that voice control is a great use case for running services locally - lower latency due to not having up upload your sample and the option of having it learn your accent is very attractive.

That said, voice control is irritatingly error-prone and seems to be slower than just reaching for the remote control. I agree that automatic stuff would be best, but some stuff you can't have rules for.

Something that would be interesting is a more eye- and gesture-based system: I'm thinking something like you look at the camera and slice across your throat for stop or squeeze fingers together to reduce volume. This is definitely one to run locally, for privacy and performance reasons.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Assistive technology has been focused on this for a while.

My brother had severe cerebral palsy and for years (80s-90s) communicated via analog technology, a literal alpha/iconography communication board, which he could tap on with a head wand. By 2000 he had a digital voice, but still had to use a wand.

Stephen Hawking demonstrated eye sensing technology almost as soon as it was invented and that’s been over a decade ago.

In most cases, there is a definite aspect of “bespokeness” to implementing assistive consumer communication technology, but the barriers implementing the same for an able audience would appear much lower.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

My #1 use case is setting timers. My hands are messy in the kitchen, need to set 35 different timers to get the kids outta the house in the morning.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I love voice control specifically for telling the house to warm up before I get out of bed. I don't even have to grab my phone. I also use it almost daily to have music start playing from spotify.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

My kids like it sometimes for asking it to tell knock-knock jokes, that's about it though.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The majority of people do not have perfect whole house motion sensors setup to turn on and off lights. Congrats, you're the 0.0001%.

Not everyone even wants lights to turn on just because the room is occupied.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

How does it know what scene you want? If you walk in to a room and want to watch TV, you might want the lights to be dimmer than if you're going to read a book, for example.

For selecting an album or movie to play, it's easier to use a menu on a screen than to try to explain it verbally.

How? I can put on my best Captain Picard voice and say 'Computer, play the album Insomniac by Green Day' much faster and easier than I could pick up the remote, turn on the media player, scroll to music, scroll to G, find Green Day, scroll to Insomniac, and press play.

I've got Amazon devices (bought before I knew how bad both they and Amazon are), and they're not great. Even with them, I can walk in to my living room in the night with my hands full and tell them to turn my chosen lights on, set the brightness and colour, start playing my chosen music, or turn the TV on and start playing certain media, all while I'm walking to my seat.

The only media that I can't play is what I haven't set up to use with Alexa yet, but that would be the same for any automation.

When I get around to it, I'm going to add either Plex or Jellyfin to my voice control setup, and hopefully be able to play anything from my library in the same way :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

When you don’t want lights on all the time, it’s a good option. You can’t program automations to do things you can’t detect automatically, such as eating vs snacking, or watching a scary movie with the spouse vs watching a “scary” movie with the kids, vs watching a kids movie.

You can automate a lot, but when you have overlapping routines that don’t work together, and don’t have a way to be detected, you’re limited in your options. Voice is one solution.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Well, Ibought a few Google speakers back in the day for easy voice commands, mostly for lights and weather.

I unplugged them for privacy. Still use one in the garage for music, but it might as well be a Bluetooth speaker at this point.

And easy to hook up local home assistance would be ideal for me. I don't want to spend weeks of my time fussing with it. It's not a hobby to me, just convenience

[–] knobbysideup 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] knobbysideup 31 points 9 months ago (7 children)

I've been doing home automation for awhile now. Voice assistant is never anything I would consider. What problem does it solve that a button doesn't do with less hassle?

Also, note automation. The whole point is for the house to do its thing with minimal interaction based on triggers and states. Everyone leaves? Turn off the lights, lock the doors, turn down the heat. TV comes on after dusk? Dim the living room lights if they are on. Going down the basement stairs? Turn on the lights. Cat just used the litter box? Turn on the hepa filter for a bit.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

What problem does it solve that a button doesn’t do with less hassle?

I'd sure like to know how you got your automation to function 100% perfectly based on simple triggers and states.

TV comes on after dusk?

What if the TV comes on in the late afternoon and normally its bright enough that it needs to close the drapes but today it's cloudy so you'd like them to be open instead so the room isn't pitch black? Or maybe you'd like to watch the backyard for some reason?

"House...open the living room drapes."

There's ALWAYS edge cases where Voice Control is useful to backstop "dumb" automatons built on triggers and states.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Sometimes:

  1. I don't have an automation ready to go to do exactly the sequence of things I want to currently do.

  2. I'm warm in bed and I'm lazy and I don't have a phone or computer handy.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

This is exactly me. I use voice command for the laziness feature. I don't often have my phone right at hand. And I just need to turn the lights up to 100%.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

It's pretty handy for things like being able to just say "hey Google, unlock the door" when I'm carrying a dozen bags of groceries.

I use automations as well, but sometimes I need something done outside of my otherwise-considered parameters. And it's easier to just yell your wish into being than to take out your phone, open an app, select the device, then pick your command.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Telling your house to go to sleep when you’re ready is much easier than stopping the cuddle with your wife or animals to press a button.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Using Voice Assist pipeline via the HASS cloud subscription works a heck of a lot better than locally. Locally it takes about 15 seconds to respond, via the Nabu Casa server it's about 1 second. I've considered dedicating a box to the containers it's instantiating to do this to get faster response.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (9 children)

I don’t think Sonos gets enough credit for their local voice control capability. It can’t be integrated into home assistant to do anything beyond controlling the Sonos speakers, but I have been ABSOLUTELY blown away by how responsive the voice commands have been. Literally a 100% success rate after using it for a couple months now. It correctly interprets if you want to start/stop playing, can find music by the artist I want from Apple Music (not sure about other streaming services), and will correctly adjust playing status for a specific speaker if you say to adjust music on that speaker only - even if you command it from another room.

The best part - no bullshit worst responses about “by the way….” Like on Alexa. At most, you get a short response like “good choice” or “ok”.

Sonos isn’t cheap, but I would 100% buy them again every time because it just works.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Except it's been in the news that they only support their products for 5 years after release. So as Apple and other streaming services update over the years, your Sonos will stop working.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Sonos can suck it for locking settings behind an app that requires your GPS in order to function.

Seriously, connecting to the device through your computer gives you less settings than on your phone.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

So what is Home Assistant using for this?

If I were to build it myself I'd probably over complicate it by using multiple llm agents on a local server. Probably use whisper to do the speech to text and then Mistral fine tuned on the Rosetta code dataset to send the API calls to HA. However that wouldnt keep it from always listening to me and trying to interpret what I say into a command for HA. Is that just a prompting issue for whisper or would I need another agent to turn on whisper?

I could maybe get this to run without specialized hardware like a GPU but it would be better to have something for the llms to be a bit more responsive.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

There is no LLM, it just used to recognize simple commands such as "turn on kitchen light". What the "conversation agent" can do is very limited, though you can extend it to recognize custom commands. It's not comparable to Google Assistant/Siri, let alone ChatGPT.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I believe there is a ChatGPT integration in the works (optional, of course)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

If it runs locally, that'll be awesome. I just hope it never decides to turn the heat up to 90F.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Anyone else see a happy little house living in the mouth of an iDomokun?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Right now, with some off-the-shelf gear and the patience to flash and fiddle, you can ask “Nabu” or “Jarvis” or any name you want to turn off some lights, set the thermostat, or run automations.

It’s not entirely fair to compare locally run, privacy-minded voice control to the “assistants” offered by globe-spanning tech companies with secondary motives.

While outgrowers are happy to leave behind the inconsistent behavior, privacy concerns, or limitations of their old systems, they can miss being able to just shout from anywhere in a room and have a device figure out their intent.

Here’s a look at what you can do today with your human voice and Home Assistant, what remains to be fixed and made easier, and how it got here.

“As it stands today, we’re not ready yet to tell people that our voice assistant is a replacement for Google/Amazon,” Schoutsen wrote.

All that said, it’s impressive how far Home Assistant has come since late 2022, when it made its pronouncement, despite not really having a clear path toward its end goal.


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