Home Assistant which AI to use

Installation
1

Hi,
Iam running HA on a Hypver-V VM, on a PC.
I would like to integrate AI (free) and would like some guidlines of what to use.
The PC have a microphone and so do my Harman Kardon speaker which use Google Home, but it never understand what am saying…

2
3

Those AI models are not free?

4

Create a small Debian installation on Hyper-V and install Ollama server inside it. Add Whisper and Ollama intagration to Home Assistant. When it asks for model, you can choose small Llama3.2:1b or Qwen2.5:0.5b. They both work for me. Then go to Assistants page and add new Assistant. Select the AI model, Speech Recog and TTS. You can also set wake word here. Sadly no online service currently gives a real free AI service. This method is the cheapest. It will even work offline.