Trying to decide between RPi5 + HAILO or Mini PC

Hardware
1

I’ve got a Raspberry Pi 4 running Home Assistant just fine, but I recently purchased an HA Voice (PE) and my goal is to set up 100% local-only home automation (including AI responses). Obviously I’ll have to use some internet services for weather, calendar, etc. but I’m wanting voice commands to work for in-house automations during an internet outage as well.

I’m torn between upgrading to a Raspberry Pi 5 with an AI HAT+ 26 TOPS or getting a $300 Linux-based mini PC running Home Assistant in a VM or Docker container.

I haven’t seen many comparisons, but was hoping someone may have experience for an ideal low-wattage system to respond to voice commands.

If the AI Hat is magic and outperforms a Ryzen 5 5500U, I’ll stick in the RPi ecosystem, otherwise I like the idea of a tiny PC I can run Docker containers or VMs on for Home Assistant, N8N, etc.

Has anyone seen a comparison for voice/chat purposes?

2

Sorry no comparison data from me, but my suggestion is to go with a PC.

I upgraded from RasPi 4 to a SFF (small form factor) used Dell Optiplex business PC which is also (comparatively) low power. It runs HAOS in a Proxmox VM; and I have a VoicePE and another voice assistant with the HA Cloud option and rarely hits 5% usage. Certainly a RasPi will do the job - but doesn’t allow you to upgrade CPU, RAM or GPU as easily as a PC does. Looking back I should have gone for one not quite so physically small, so I can add a graphics card.

Most HA integrations have minimal requirements … but voice, video and especially AI can use all the processing power you can throw at it. Plenty of threads about AI in the Voice Assistant section.

Actually HAOS, Raspberry Pi OS and proxmox are all based on Debian linux, so already the same ecosystem.