As @madelena said in the Open Home presentation, start with the problem, so here goes.
The Problem:
I, and I assume many other home assistant users, want to use a multitude of features and devices, many of which have similar, but slightly different hardware requirements. This means that we need a multitude of adaptors, proxies, bridges, voice satellites, wall-mounted dashboards etc. Each of these devices has its own barrier to entry, learning curve, power supply, WIFI adaptor (or ideally ethernet connection), and in the case of voice assistant - microphones, speakers and optionally a screen. Getting each of these wired and connected in the right place, with House Approval Factor is no mean feat.
My solution:
If these can be largely consolidated then users can simplify their set ups, save on e-waste and on power consumption. Many of the upcoming ESP devices that can support matter contain WiFi, bluetooth, thread & zigbee chips. That means that, RAM and CPU permitting, we could have a Bluetooth proxy, thread boarder router, Zigbee router (and/or Zigbee controller?), voice satellite all in one low cost, low energy device. One per room could enable a whole host of home assistant features.
Advantages
One, go-to satellite device will offer a really simple way for less technical users to expand their smart home, enabling a number of features in one go (Bluetooth presence, voice assistant, matter, ZHA etc) and these would provide a great platform for adding new consumer devices to your smart home as you’d have both the connectivity required, and the means to control the devices (voice).
Disadvantages
- Less redundancy, if a device breaks, a large amount of features are lost simultaneously
- Competes with multiple ecosystems at once
- Couples feature sets - users may expect that because a device acts as a bluetooth proxy that the voice assistant on the same device must be able to answer questions about nearby devices.
In my opinion, HomeAssistant should think about how many of these features they could get on to one ESPHome device.
Links
- Upcoming ESP Boards that support many protocols
- ESP Page with RAM warning about combining Bluetooth Proxy and Voice Assistant