Can I make a Home Assistant native Intercom?

So I’m about to build a new front section for our house. Doorbell (simple), Camera (simple) etc. and I am thinking about adding a speaker and microphone to the Setup to have a home assistant native Intercom setup.

I could find remarkably little about any kinds of intercom. I know there’s the announce feature, but I don’t really see how that would help with an intercom. I’d really need a two-way audio solution like is offered in frigate, but I’d really like to have a dedicated intercom only system that I can use from home assistant and that is fully open source, regardless the camera stream (that’s going to be handled by frigate), kind of also in the hopes of speeding up connection times.

I’m completely free to choose the type of connection, I will have LAN+PoE + KNX available, but I can really pull any kind of wire necessary, just in case.

Any ideas?

HA is basically a command and control service.
It does not as such provide the services. It only controls them.

You need to find a program that can do the intercom and then look into what options you have for HA to interact with it, like connect subscribers of the intercom and disconnect them again and so on.

Asterisk might be able to do it.

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Oh that sounds interesting!

Sure, I’m well aware that ha only controls the services, I agree that I did not choose the best words to describe what I am looking for :sweat_smile:

Is there anybody out there using Asterisk for a doorbell intercom?

This is the AddOn that several users use for an intercom solution.

If your doorbell supports SIP then it can probably be used as an intercom.

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I am essentially starting with an empty box. There is only a dumb doorbell so far, but enough space for anything really.

I see asterisk can provide the software foundation, that’s nice. Is there any open source SIP hardware around? Seems ESP32, even with Ethernet is not well suited for this …