WTH not make default wake-word on official Home Assistant branded voice hardware something other than ”Okay Nabu”?

Month of "What the heck?!"
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Why make the default wake-word when talking to all official Home Assistant branded voice hardware something other than ”Okay Nabu” (which now looks to ship as default on the first preview voice hardware)?

Or rather, why not make the default wake-word “Okay Home Assistant”, “Okay Assist”, “Okey Open Home”, , or something else in reference Home Assistant, Assist (“Assist” as in Home Assistant’s default conversation agent), the Open Home Foundation, or alternativly something completely arbitrary that have no reference to Nabu Casa which is a commercial company? …how about maybe holding a contest to submit ideas for new unique wake words and wake word phrases?

As I understand, the idea is to both standardize and fully open-source the voice hardware platform to also make it easy for other third-party companies to make their own Home Assistant voice hardware, and then it simply makes no sense for other companies to make their standard wake-work for ”Nabu” anything, so then we will surley get a fractured standard.

In direct comparision, it is called “Home Assistant Cloud”, (and not “Nabu Cloud”), even though the service is provided by Nabu Casa.

On the contrary, Assist is Home Assistant’s free and open-source home-grown voice assistant. Assist is the underlying technology that allows Home Assistant to turn commands (“turn on the light”) into Actions (light.turn_on ).

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Assist can’t understand spoken words that are needs something to take that audio and turn it into text - all this together is called an Assist pipeline. Which converts spoken commands into intents (Assist’s built-in sentences).

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Assist is available to use on most platforms that can interface with Home Assistant. Look for the Assist icon.

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Backstory; I read that the upcoming official Home Assistant branded smart speaker will use ”Okay Nabu” as its default wake word using these microWakeWord (micro wake word) model linked here:

I understand that the sole reason for picking ”Okay Nabu” is it the codebase has until now primarly been developed by employees from Home Assistant’s commercial partner Nabu Casa (or at least by dveelopers that are now employees of Nabu Casa even if they didn’t begin development as such) and ”Okay Nabu” is a referrence to the company name that they work for, and I know that Nabu Casa as also the company that will manufacture and distribute this upcoming official Home Assistant branded voice hardware.

But I also understand that the upcoming hardware will be an official “Home Assistant” branded voice hardware and not a “Nabu Casa” branded hardware. And while might be marked and marketed as “Home Assistant XYZ-Product by Nabu Casa”, it will not be marked and marketed as “Nabu Casa XYZ-Product for Home Assistant”.

Now that Home Assistant is owned by a nonprofit organization (NPO) which have goals to become a 501(c)(3) organization then is that really appropriate that the

If the default wake-word you pick now for the first product is likley to stick and be used by default in all official Home Assistant branded voice hardware then why not choose something that represent the Home Assistant project and community instead of the Nabu Casa company.

Chances are great that the firmware will be mainlined and many others who do not work for Nabu Casa will be contributing and help maintain the codebase in the future, however I believe there is a risk that whatever ships with the first product will likley stick as the default forever.

It not only that I personally do not want to use ”Okay Nabu” as wakeword and not that we will not be able to change it outselves to something else, it is also that I as a fan of the Free and open-source software (FOSS) philosophy do not think it is appropriate to name the default wake word after a commercial company, even though I otherwise love everything almost everything else that Nabu Casa as compoany and all their employees does to drive this project.

Again, love most what Nabu Casa does but I do not like to have ”Okay Nabu” as default wakeword and I think using it as default is a mistake.

PS: I previously submitted same as above as a feature request but think that it fits better as a WTH:

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Hi Hedda.
FWIW I agree. For me, “Okay Nabu” is not a phrase that catches the imagination, or sounds good as a wake word, regardless of any commercial .v. open source, etc. arguements. It’s just unappealing! Something with a better “ring” to it - or at least a choice of built-in wake words - would be preferable.
OR ideally make it easy to install your own wake words, but I suspect that needs a lot of development still.

Why does it have to be “Okay …” or “Hey …”, etc. anything? If I want to get someone’s attention I just say their name, not Okay Jack or Hey Mary, etc.

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I agree that “Okay” and “Hey” are unappealing ways to address anyone (or anything).

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They aren’t meant to be appealing. They’re meant to be a way to keep from triggering the Voice Assistant if your chosen wake word is the same as or similar to a commonly used word.

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Best practice is for a wake word to not only not use a phrase that is not that comonly used but the word or phrase should preferably also contain more than a couple of syllables so there is a less chance that the wrong word or phrase trigger the wake word by accident.

So for example ”siri” only has 2 syllables, and ”alexa” has 3 syllables, while the phrases ”Okay Google” and ”Okay Nabu” both has 4 syllables. Note then that the phrase ”Okay Home Assistent” has 6 syllables.

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How about “Attention Nabu”? Plenty of syllables but not quite so casual or rude.

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Well it is speciifically the word ”Nabu” that I oppose for the multiple reasons aleady given above.

But ”Attention Assist” or ”Attention Home Assistant”!
could be good for English speaking languages. It does however not work as well for non-english languages, as for a global audience with different languages the ”Okay…” something phrases works better.

That is why starting a phrase with ”Okay…” is kind smart since a variant of it is commonly used in many other languages, so it is globally recogniced, but on the downside ”OK” is a word that we say a lot in other conversation, which explains why Google has so many false possitivea on their wake word.

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How about just “Attention Assisstant”

or
“Wake Up Assistant”

or
“Listen Up Assistant”

or my personal favorite:
“I’m fixin to tell you something”

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It looks like the new device from Nabu Casa actually supports three options out of the box, though “Okay Nabu” is the one selected by default.

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options are
“Okay Nabu,” “Hey Jarvis,” or “Hey Mycroft”

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Wish that they had at least shipped with ”Okay Home Assistant” and ”Okay Assist” (instead or “Hey Jarvis,” or “Hey Mycroft” as those are not directly related to Home
Home Assistant).

Mycroft is also not in the spiritnof open-source to use in a product that represent a nonprofit orginazation as it referes to another commercial company (where Mike Hanson used to work) and they removed the copyleft licence of their Mycroft project → Mycroft (software) - Wikipedia

And while being able to call for JARVIS is cool because it refers to Tony Stark’s virtual assistant in Marvel’s Iron Man it is also ironic to use for similar reasons since Disney now owns the intelligent property of Marvel, and Disney is not well known for taking it lightly when they learn that others are even just somewhat using their intelligent property to make money.

Again, Nabu here refers to Nabu Casa which is also commercial company, and as a company they could be bought by someone else in the future. Regardless, even Nabu Casa the company and the Open Home Foundation share all its board member today, that might not always be the case.

Open Home Foundation might gain more commercial partners in the future, and now that the Home Assistant voice hardware has been announced as an open source platform we will surley see other companies wanting to make Home Assistant voice hardware, so you then expect them to use Nabu as their default wake-word too?

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Please my friends, think a bit before you talk: Anything starting with "Attention” needs translation to be used in other languages. The microWakeWord technology that provides reliable wake word recognition on low performance hardware like ESP32 needs many audio examples and extensive training for each and every wake word and each translation. This may be an option later, but not at the very start.

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I just wanna say that in Portuguese, the word Nabu sounds like “nabo” which is the name of a vegetable, called Raddish in English:

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I find that funny!! But I don’t want to wake my speaker by calling a vegetable, so I agree it should be something else.

How about “Hey flash”, or maybe “Listen home”, followed by the command.

Example: hey flash, turn on the living lights
“listen home, turn off the dining tv”

That’s simple, fast, elegant and unambiguous.

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I really like the wake word as “Okay, Nabu”

EDIT: The phrase will never occur in normal conversation and uses sounds that exist in most languages. It is quite versatile.

Does anyone know the origin of the word “Nabu”? Does it have an actual meaning?

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These three options seem to me that we are just thinking in English speaking people.

It’s fine for now, we have to start somewhere. But if we want to increase accessibility or be more family friendly, we should advance exploring other alternatives.

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In my childhood, we called “Nabu” to a planet of the Star Wars universe… :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Nabu casa

Nabu god of wisdom
Casa, house in Spanish

Wisdom Spanish house

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New suggestion: “Okay, wisdom spanish house”

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I have a completely separate take on why Nabu is a problem: The correct/desired pronunciation (at least in English) is impossible to determine if you have never heard the word spoken. I have NEVER watched one of the HASS blogs. Every time I see that word I gloss over it because I don’t know if it’s:

Nay-boo? (As in “the horse says neigh”)
Nah-boo? (Like naught)
Naaa-boo? (Like nag)

For anyone old enough to remember, at some point Linus Torvalds actually had to release a sound clip of himself saying something like “This is Linus, you pronounce Linux like this” so people would stop arguing about how it was supposed to be pronounced. This reminds me of that…

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“Assist Me”
I agree that OK Nabu is by far not my preference, plus I can see this being a 30 min discussion everytime that I have a new guest at home trying to explain what is Nabu, why did I chose it, and if a computer is that smart, why didn’t I change it to something else!