Would love to see more official compute hardware options that are are more power than the Home Assistant Green. Maybe a continuous series that covers entry-level, mid-range, and high-end without hpibg the PC-route, all capable of running the full voice pipeline locally.
Alternativly a new network-attached ”AI base station” as a stand-alone appliance that can easily ve replaced and/or upgraded seperatly, similar how a NAS (storage server) can sit anywhere on your network at just be great at one thing, but with focus on being a local AI server. And I honestly think that modular approach would make more sense from a retail purchase point-of-view as someone who already bought a Home Assistant Green could partially upgrade their setup by just buying a such ”AI base station” (networked AI-server appliance).
At least mid-range hardware from China are coming down in price and offer more M.2 PCIe slots for expandability. Just check out for example the new Radxa Orion O6N and Orange Pi 6 Plus in Nano-ITX SBC form factor based on CIX P1 12-core ARMv9 SoC with 30 TOPs NPU which have up to 64GB RAM and two M.2 Key-M sockets for storage and/or AI accelerators:
If could combine something like that with one or two optional M.2 AI accelerator cards such as the Geniatech AIM-M2 40 TOPS AI Accelerator M.2 Key-M Module (based on the Kinara Ara-2 NPU) with 16GB VRAM onboard then that could perhaps be good enough to call it a entry-level Edge AI server if packaged the right way?
AI acceleration hardware is moving fast so would be great if were an official solution that was upgradable.
For reference, FutureProofHomes posted a sneak peak video of their upcoming AI Base Station running local LLM a few of months ago, however that is more of a software solution as the hardware shown more or less just a Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano 8GB which makes it fast but expensive and memory constraint if wanting to run multiple AI modules for both generation and reasoning.
