Facebook Portal: the ultimate voice satellite

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I have been looking to replace my aging Google Home speakers for some time, but I have been unable to find a suitable replacement. All the Home Assistant-compatible voice satellites have serious compromises.

Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition Poor speaker. No screen
ESP32-S3-BOX Series Worse Speaker. Tiny screen. Poor mic
Third Reality Voice/Music Assistant Poor software. Decent speaker. No screen
Satellite 1.1 Smart Speaker Good speaker. No screen. Expensive
ESP32 chatbots / ESP32 boards Need a decent case. Poor speaker
Raspberry Pi boards Frankenstein mess of cables. Need case
Android Tablets/phones Battery issues. Need a stand. Poor speaker

Facebook Portal

What we need is a device that looks good, has good build quality, has a good speaker, has a 4-way microphone, and works great. Best of all, you can buy them here in the UK for about £20 for Portal mini, £50 for the Portal and £75 for the monster Portal Plus

The Facebook Portal has recently been unlocked and is a fantastic device. It just needed some good software.

Please, if nothing else, take a look at AVA PRO . This has transformed the Facebook Portal into a stunning voice assistant. @knopp7 has done an extraordinary job. I whipped up this quick video. I have deliberately spoken over talk radio to show just how good this hardware with AVA Pro software is.

I have created a number of blueprints and HTML screens that were used in the video. I don’t have an enormous computer with a large LLM doing the heavy lifting.

This was all done using Music Assistant, the standard Home Assistant conversation assistant and Nabu Casa STT and TTS. I used a very small LLM (qwen3:4b-instruct, 2.5 GB) with Brave/SearXNG internet lookup to stop it from hallucinating. I used Ollama AI Task to tidy the voice requests for the music assistant and general knowledge questions. Smoke and mirrors, really. :slightly_smiling_face:

This matches everything I could do on Google Home, and if I could get Whisper working reliably locally, it would be cloud-free.

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Have managed to get Whisper and Piper running locally; see Jetson Nano Orin config for Whisper and Piper

Has made only a minor speed update in response times; unfortunately, most of the delay seen in the video is caused by Music Assistant search and internet lookup.

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Wow, that’s so cool! I guess sharing it on Reddit would get more views, but it’s already amazing!!

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How does Ava Pro compare to Portal HA Bridge?

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The main difference is AVA Pro is not a launcher, running lots of independent applications tied together. AVA Pro is a single unified piece of software. The assistant built into AVA Pro is a fully flegged ESPHome device, the same as the Nabu Casa Box. Portal HA Bridge uses a third-party assistant which requires third-party keys.

AVA Pro has a sendspin media client built-in (with a very nice display), so it can play directly from Music Assistant or Home Assistant as a remote speaker. Portal HA Bridge is dedicated to the Portal. However, AVA Pro has a portal add-in, which adds the additional sensors, presence, light, tilt, etc.
If you want a dedicated home assistant voice satellite, AVA Pro is a much better choice. If you just want to bring back some functionality to the Portal and use it as a tablet, look at Immortal

A better comparison would be against View Assist This is also a dedicated voice assistant which also works very nicely with the Portal

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Thanks for your input - I’m just having a play now.

Which model of Portal do you have? I can’t figure out the Shizuku step.

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Portal Gen 2 and portal mini. You don’t need Shizuku to test. The only issue is this one Cannot grant Device Admin through UI on Facebook Portal devices · Issue #78 · knoop7/Ava · GitHub .

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I’ve bought a couple Portals off the back of this post…wish me luck :sweat_smile: :rofl: