Every so often somebody asks for recommendation of best voice Assistant for HA.
Looking in the Analytics I was disappointed to see that the vast majority of installed voice assistants are still cloud based. I understand the superior processing power of the industry behemoths, and the manufacturing scale to get the price of satellite hardware down … But isn’t HA about providing an alternative to corporate cloud processing ?
Google Cast 40.6%
Google Assistant 20.2%
Apple Homekit 17.1%
Amazon Alexa 8.9%
Almond 1.3%
A year ago when I started my own voice assistant journey I was very impressed by the Almond demo and HA’s statement that Almond will be the official HA voice assistant. In the mean-time Sanford have published another fancy demo (Genie) which use customised hardware, but otherwise very little has changed. Apparently each Genie satellite requires on its own full Home Assistant. Given the huge proportion of users who want voice control, this doesn’t seem very practical. Can HA / Nabu Casa sponsor someone to work on voice assistant for HA ? And when Genie matures it can be integrated.
And then I found Rhasspy. I now have HA OS, MQTT and Rhasspy add-on running on my Base station (RasPi 4 4MB). More importantly I have 3 satellite systems throughout the house:
- satellite 1 is a RasPi 3A+ with reSpeaker 4 HAT
- satellite 2 is a RasPi zero W with reSpeaker 2-mic HAT
- satellite 3 is a RasPi 3B with USB microphone and USB speakers
All satellites provide microphone, wake-word detection, and speaker services; with Speech-to-text, Intent recognition, and Text-to-Speech done by Rhasspy on the Base station. Sure it’s not Google quality, but it is available now, runs locally, on low cost hardware, and is all open source. The AI modules can easily be swapped to a more powerful processor. Michael has merged the best of snips functionality, and other projects. Have a look at all the modules currently available for Rhasspy.
In Decmber Michael Hansen (Synesthesiam - chief developer of Rhasspy) was lured away to work on Mycroft.AI
The Future of Rhasspy, with the intention to bring both these open source projects more together.
I would recommend that, when it becomes practical, Nabu Casa approach Michael and offer him a job.