I have 3 google mini’s around my house that I have hooked up to HA and I obvisouly don’t like the fact that it’s always listening but my kids are always using it so I haven’t looked at other solutions until now. I’m just wondering if anybody has setup Almond and Ada or Rhasspy or any other solution so it’s all local.
I’m leaning towards Ada and Almond, but am unsure on the hardware required/speakers that can be used around the house. My HA box is down in the basement hidden away, so I’m looking to see what kidn of hardware setup in terms of speakers do I need. Could I use my google home mini’s with ada and almond and just block internet access to those speakers?
I’ve tried some local voice/TTS systems and have never been too happy with them. First off they often tend to take a decent amount of horsepower to use and that just adds to the complexity of my home automation. Second is I find their dictionary to be lacking after being “spoiled” by the likes of Alexa or Siri.
For me I am Apple all the way around, so I have an extremely robust voice and TTS system using HomePods, HomeKit and integrating with Airfoil for whole-house notifications and interaction with HA. In fact, I can count on one hand (it’s hard to count but I try…) how many times I do not us voice automation and resort to clicking a button on something. 99.9% of everything I do is either 100% automated or done via voice using Siri.
While nobody is perfect, I tend to trust Apple’s voice system more than anyone else - particularly Google.