Hardware recommendations for Almond

Configuration Voice Assistant
1

I’m finally tired of having google mini’s in my house and I’m looking to setup Almond and move my HA raspberry pi 4 to the main living room in my house. Does anybody have a speaker with built in mic recommendations?

I was thinking something like this should probably work?

or

Thanks!

2

Right there with you. Have you tried with or these yet?

3

I am also looking to reply my Google Home’s at some point, if Genie is good enough. But I am also worried the problem is getting good hardware, the Mini’s are very convenient.

4

Ok so I’ve tried the Kaysuda USB speaker phone but it seems to crash my whole entire HA instance so that’s not good LOL. I would buy the jabra USB speaker phone that they testing genie with except it’s 170$ CAD and I’m just not willing to pay that. I’m hoping I or somebody else can test some more speakers out. I’ll probably wait until Genie actually gets fully added to the hassio addons page since Genie is exactly what I’m looking for since you can apparently setup multiple clients around the house.

5

Well that’s disappointing. I wanted to test the Kaysuda also. What is your HA platform and do you know what happened?

6

My understanding is that there are 2 distinct areas where Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Apple have the financial resources to get significantly better results:

  1. Cheap satellite devices with DSP (Digital Signal Processing) logic built-in, to better hear the commands
  2. Massive processing power in “the cloud”, for the AI (Artificial Intelligence) to better recognice your intent, and to reply in a more natural manner.

From the demo, it looks that Almond and Genie are addressing the second area; and using customised devices (not available to the public) for the first.

For satellite devices (microphone, speaker, WLAN and optionally Wakeword recognition) …

  • most of the cheaper reSpeaker 2-mic, 4-mic and 6-mic devices do NOT have DSP built-in, and effectively only using one microphone. Maybe DSP functions could be added to the driver or software ?
  • devices with DSP built into firmware are available - but at much higher price
  • Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Apple devices are locked in to their cloud services.

So, no obvious hardware recommendation at this time :frowning:

7

I’m running hassio on an RPI4, didn’t have time to look at the logs to see what actually happened and it doesn’t really look like they are working on genie since it’s still not in the addon store. I’ll just be patient and hopefully they will develop it more.

8

I am running HA on a NUC (NUC6i3SYH) and went ahead and “braved the darkness” and bought a Kaysuda USB Speaker Phone 360. It worked out of the box!

2 Likes
9

Really?! that’s awesome news! that means I just need to figure out what’s going on with my setup then! So you could interact with the speaker and everything eh?

Thanks for replying and updating!!

10

The system wakes to ‘computer’ and I’ve kicked on lights. I’m still struggling with how to activate devices. Seem you have to be very specific. Ex: in my office I have 2 lightbulb (named light 1 and light 2) and I want both to turn on when I tell it to turn on the lights. Alexa knows them as “office lights” but HA does not. So I have to asked twice, once for each light, and specify their specific device names.

It’s a start!

11

Ah ok well that’s awesome then thanks for sharing that! I’ve already ordered that speaker again and hopefully I’ll get some time to test it out tomorrow night.

12

Ok I can confirm this worked for me as well! Not sure why it didn’t work before but I’m pretty freaking happy about this. I’ll probably be getting rid of my google homes now! I just need to figure out how to integrate my script of the morning weather to be played through this speaker as it doesn’t seem to expose any media player entity.

13

Maybe try to group the lights, into a light group (Light Group - Home Assistant) and use the name of the group instead?

14

Anyone have a solution for many mics? I have 8 Google Minis, in different rooms ind the house, so USB will not do.

15

I tried that but it didn’t recognize the group name.