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