Hi,
Do you know, any good looking smart speakers for Snips?
DIY speakers look awful. I could put Snips RPi hidden and then connect sattelite speakers across the house.
I’m also interested in this.
Its been a while, but did you know they now have dedicated hardware for the snips project?
Check out: https://www.seeedstudio.com/snips.html
There is a base kit with raspberry pi + speaker + microphone, and also satellite kits which can connect to the base and can be installed in several rooms.
I am pretty much interested in this, but haven’t tried it out myself yet. I’ve installed snips on my pi once, however I failed to find a suitable microphone. The one I’ve had was bad quality, and I had a lot of wrong activations triggered when the TV was running.
But I like the idea of controlling all of HA with snips, from any room, without alexa/google etc.
If anyone already tried out the maker kits, please add your experience here.
Yes – i used the maker kit. I have two of them right now.
One maker kit is live in my main snips installation in my home, and the other maker kit was used for a workshop i did at a security conference on how to flash smartplugs to tasmota and use Snips to have a cloudless home automation solution.
House: i have home-assistant running in docker/RancherOS as a plain vanilla install. I have a mqtt server running as a docker container and several other docker containers running as well. Snips runs on a dedicated maker-kit/raspi3B+ and connects via wired ethernet.
Lab: I have home-assistant running on a NUC using the hass.io package/supervisor. I have the MQTT add-on running. Snips runs on a dedicated maker-kit/raspi3B and connects via wired ethernet.
I will work on getting my howto at www.hackspace.io updated and more complete soon – in the next couple days.
short guide for the maker kit…
install SAM on the raspi itself.
use SAM to update the snips installation
hit up the snips console, find/train the hass assistant package
make the tweaks to the snips installation/maker kit that are listed here: http://www.hackspace.io/?page_id=245
deploy the assistant.
(the end).
I will get this documented with more granularity soon. life is busy 
sorry for the delays.
How’s the quality of the microphone? Do you get many false activations? How is the overall quality compared to e.g. Siri oder Alexa?
I have only used it rudymentary, as I said, since I didnt get a good microphone. The false activations were just too discouraging, so I didn’t bother to work with it any further.
However I am thinking about getting the maker kit, and especially the satellites sound promising, so I can have small relays in other rooms which connect to the same service.
My setup is similar to yours, my home assistant is running on my pi3 already, and the maker kit would bring a dedicated pi3 for snips.
i have not had issues with false activations. it seems a bit LESS sensitive than alexa/ghome, sometimes i have to speak a bit louder for it to hear me but i have noisy kids and the placement in the room is for sure not optimal.
You can set the sensativity of the wake word…
https://docs.snips.ai/articles/platform/wakeword/multiple-wakewords
I’ve been having good success with the Jabra 410 or 510 series. They are USB and are basically plug and play.
There’s a bluetooth option too, but haven’t tested that. This would make it quite nice to move around.
These thing are not super cheap, but they work well.