I am a heavy HA user, with almost 10000 entities, automations and sensors, running quite fast on an i5 Dell mini pc
I have decided that is the time to use the Voice Assistant so I have installed the add-ons Whisper and Piper to support it. I have follow many YouTube guides of how to build a speaker which it works BUT EXTREMELY SLOW. Sometimes it need 10 15 secs to respond back
So it is the time to upgrade my HA pc. What do you suggest in order to run the Voice Assistant smoothly?
I am thinking of buying a mini pc with i5 1340 processor which is 12 cores with 32gb of RAM.
I don’t think you’ll get significant improvements using the CPU - you need a high performance GPU to make a difference.
There’s a project called Willow which may provide some insights into this. Sadly it’s no longer being supported (the developer died) but the GitHub pages are quite illuminating.
I built one of these around a second hand gaming card (EVGA GTX 1070 FTW ACX3.0). I had to get a gaming box with flashing lights and illuminated fans to mount it in - a bit embarrassing - but that was only i5 and the results were startling.
TL;DR - Local voice assistants are very resource hungry.
Edit: There’s a Willow discord server with a few guys still active on it. They’re investigating alternatives and may be able to offer suggestions.