Please do not make the default wake-word of the first official Home Assistant voice assistent hardware ”Okay Nabu” as a reference to any commercial partners, regardless if Nabu Casa is currently the only large commercial partner to Home Assistant, ESPHome and the Open Home Foundation.
Suggest that Home Assistant project leaders consider holding public community vote or some other more transparent process to pick an official wake-word default as think it would be wierd for you to just use ”Ok Nabu” as the official default wake-word for the open source Home Assistant (and ESPHome) project simply because Nabu Casa representa the commercial side that build the first hardware when many other companies will surley also be making Home Assistant voice assistant hardware soon.
You are taking a stance and potentially alienating other potential partners and the open-source community by marking the default wake-word as belonging to Nabu Casa.
I am sure someone can come up with a better default if you feel that for example ”Hey Open Home”, Okey Home Assistent”, or ”Okey Assist” are not good enough.
Home Assistant and ESPHome are both FOSS (free and open source) project and is now owned by the Open Home Foundation which is a non-profit originazation looking for a 501(c) exemtion, so in the spirit of FOSS and nonprofit you must certainly be able to choose a better default wake-word than the name of any commercial partner if it will be used in officially Home Assistant branded hardware (and not Nabu Casa branded hardware), even if that is the company where the lead developers are working now, there will probably be more/additional commercial partners to the Open Home Foundation in the future and there are aready loads of developers contributing to the Home Assistent and ESPHome project in the that do not work for Nabu Casa.
Finally, as the Home Assistent Assist and voice assistent project leaders pointed out in the ”Help us make voice better in under a minute” blog-post where they explain why crowdsourcing samples is needed, doing your own training of custom microWakeWord (mWW) wake-word models is not easy or simple to do if want a good result:
That wasn’t a question to me, but honestly I got a bit confused about who does what as well. The post in general makes it seem “we” means Home Assistant and the foundation, not Nabu Casa. But I guess the hardware will actually still be designed, owned and sold by Nabu Casa like the other things?
This is maybe a topic for another discussion, but I still struggle to understand what exactly is the role of the foundation and its relation with Nabu Casa. The way the text on the foundation website is written make it seem the separation is real and strong (Nabu Casa is only mentioned in third person, called a sponsor and said to get no special benefits). I thought the blog posts would be written from that perspective as well, hence the confusion.
Not upset but yes I do think that it is a bad idea because it will be official ”Home Assistant” branded hardware, (as I understand it it will not be ”Nabu Casa” branded hardware), and being first it will set a precedent of promoting ”Nabu” refering to the Nabu Casa company instead of promoting Home Assistant (or Home Assistant’s Assist voice assistant), ESPHome, and the Open Home Foundation.
Kind of odd if officially ”Home Assistant” branded hardware where the brand is now owned by a non-profit orginazation is via this method in practive doing advertisement for a for-profit company. It can be a conflict of interest when a member of the nonprofit board has a personal interest that may influence them when making decisions. Normally an NPO has a conflict of interest policy prevents directors with conflicts from participating in discussion, reporting or voting on any issue where there is a real or perceived conflict.
I mean that this is therefore very likely to decide what will be used as default by others and be followed as an official reference in the future.
That is, this choice of having ”Ok Nabu” as default now is likely to set a precedent for all others that follow in the future.
So what is made default in the first version could have big impact on what will be the default in all other official versions to come and thus also default in DIY and third-party versions as well.
I think this would be a good idea to use it as a marketing stategy to make ”Home Assistant” and ”Assist” more common household namnes instead of promoting Nabu Casa.
I guess this is also why Home Assistent Cloud is called that and not Nabu Casa Cloud, and why we have Home Assistent Green and Home Assistant SkyConnect/Connect branded product, not Nabu Casa branded products.
All this is important to make ”Home Assistent” a brand that more people know about, it would be good marketing see think of it as advertising everytime someone says ”Hey Home Assistant” to a voice assistant in your home.
Why not focus on making ”Home Assistant” the brand to remember?
PS: I pay for Home Assistent Cloud and do encurage everyone else to do so too for the sole reason of supporting the Nabu Casa team and I do love what they do, with the exception of this specific decision.
“can he changed easily” is a bit of a simplification of the situation though in my opinion The recent initiative to ask for voice samples made it rather clear: the collected data foremost optimises the usage of “hey nabu”, it’s not a generic collection of data that improves just any wake word.
Is it possible to use other wake words? Yes
But is “hey nabu” being given the most love when it comes to recognition quality etc? Also yes.
I’m going with what Michael wrote in the voice sample thread in this comment:
" For those interested in making their own wake word, it is possible today with microWakeWord but requires a good GPU and expertise to tune it correctly."
“Does this just improve “Okay Nabu” or also future wake words?
For now, mostly just “Okay Nabu”. (…)”
You are right, I didn’t train etc a dedicated wake word yet, but with these being quotes from THE wake word guy in NC, it’s kind of hard to not see this as a priority on “hey nabu”. Again: I’m fully with you that own wake words are possible, but “hey nabu” is definitely being pushed and optimised on specifically.
Yep, and I just don’t see any negatives with making okay nabu the wake word. I also don’t see how improving it is a bad thing for the community either. Yet here we are having this discussion, simply because a few people didn’t get to decide on the word.
With all Respect, boiling it down to “because a few people didn’t get to decide on the word” is too simplified i think, and focussing on Symptoms (which maybe are not a Problem at all).
It is not only about one particular Decision User xy would have liked it the other Way.
Behind that Decision lie Questions about organisation Structure, how a Non-Profit-Organisation of a Community-driven Project decides, and a possible conflict of Interest, if the deciding People at the Non-Profit-Org have their Daytime Job at the Sponsoring Organisation.
Hedda perfectly outlined it.
I think i need to say it again: Personally, most of the Decisions beeing made i either like, appreciate, or can live with that.
And i can live with OK Nabu, even though its a quite prominent promotion for the (commercial) Sponsor, especially if it is not baked in and can be exchanged.
Maybe the easier thing to ask for at this moment would be:
“who, for the time being, feels comfortable with using “OK Nabu” for now”, not saying that this will be the one wake word to rule them all and in their smart homes bind them.
Might give a more clear, but quite possibly entirely non-representative, view than asking for everybody’s individual favorite, which might end up in a list of entries similarly long as the number of participants.
Given, that quite some people have already contributed to the “OK Nabu” database the outcome of this might be clear.
That is not true, maybe you are confusing training microWakeWord (mWW) models with training wakewords for openWakeWord models?
Training microWakeWord (mWW) models for microcontrollers like ESP32 is not simple at all, it is very complicated and fact is that also require loads of samples to get good results (which is why they crowd sourced that for ”Okey Nabu”), see:
The is an open issue because an all-in-one training notebook is missing for microWakeWord and that also mentions that training microWakeWord is harder and require more resources as well as requires longer training times so can likley not be done for free in the cloud via Google Colab. Read:
It is relativly simple to train open-wake-word as that process has been scripted and automation but openWakeWord is not what runs on the new ESP32 based voice satellites, oWW runs only on faster computer CPUs like Raspberry Pi 3+. Again, openWakeWord is not what will be used in these projects:
And now I do have a problem with the wake word. My So already doesn’t care for voice and quite honesty HATES ok Nabu.
She’s however ok with our planned wake word. Now I apparently need to start studying how to build a microwakeword.
And THAT changes my answer. That DOES make it a defacto standard and ido have a problem with that. Givee at least 4 to choose from while I train OK, Friday and I suddenly don’t care anymore.
Why this matters. I was going to buy 8 of these puppies on pre-order day. Now. That is on pause untili have a way to change the wake word.
It can be very hard to be the face of an unpopular decision, thank you for your work moderating this forum!
I would recommend that you take a break from posting in this thread because you seem to be getting defensive, and nothing good comes from being defensive online.
Our concerns are reasonable so minimizing them is not courteous, but you also should not deal with anger from us!
I think we can all agree on this, does anyone disagree?
I’m not angry, just baffled. There’s always something people are upset with on these forums and it always leaves me scratching my head. I just don’t understand glass half empty thinkers, always taking the negative in any decision. (P.s. it’s usually the same group of 10 people commenting and hearting the same 10 people)
The recent initiative to ask for voice samples made it rather clear: the collected data foremost optimises the usage of “hey nabu”, it’s not a generic collection of data that improves just any wake word.