Year of voice question (another one)

I read through the chapter 5 of year of voice and have a question. Especially since @synesthesiam is working on alot of this :slight_smile:

In chapter 5 we have this bit

" For Chapter 5, we’ve extended this list to include:

  • Adding items to a to-do list - “add take out the garbage to my task list”
  • Getting the inside temperature - “what’s the temperature?”
  • Getting the current weather condition - “what’s the weather like?”
  • Canceling a satellite wake-up - “never mind”"

Don’t get me wrong I am excited for this. But, as I still have rhasspy running as well, I am a little confused why we have gone away from the concept of creating our own intents and now having to have it created in the core.

In rhasspy, I have additional things I added as intent systems that don’t even go to home assistant. My kids love being able to use the “joke of the day”. I created a plugin that helps me just remember where I put stuff or what kind of this goes in that? “hey rhasspy, remember i put those safety goggles in the kitchen drawer” “hey rhasspy, remember that the downstairs ac vent uses this size filter” then i can come back later and ask

“hey rhasspy, where did i put the safety goggles”, “what size filter goes in the downstairs ac”

To do these things in HA, iw ould have to figure out how to get more things into HA that in my opinion doesn’t need to be in there. I know the joke of the day is proabably an easy one, a rest sensor ect. But it’s an example. But my other one, i would have to do what? create a sensor for every thing i asked it to keep track of? those things aren’t really relevent to HA but are VERY relevant to things like a voice assistant.

I am all on board with adding voice to HA, Im just wondering if it’s possible we are “adding voice to HA” instead of creating a good “voice assistant”.

The voice assistant SHOULD be able to do more than just control HA stuff right? That’s why I LOVED rhasspy. It integrated well with HA, but did other things.

Just wondering if I am alone on this one. :confused:

I’m not sure I understand your question. You can still create custom sentences and intents. I have not used Rhasspy, but I assume you’ve built something to support “hey rhasspy, where did i put the safety goggles”. So if you move this to HA you would call your “something” from an intent script. No need for extra sensors unless you want them. However, I’m not sure voice in HA has all the customising potential of Rhasspy (yet).

The logic behind supporting “what’s the weather like?” is that (allegedly) people expect voice assistants to handle stuff like this automatically thanks to google/alexa/siri. This is better explained in the video for chapter 5.

As @michaelblight said, custom sentences are a way of extending HA without modifying core. This isn’t quite as customizable as Rhasspy, but it is a good way hooking into other HA integrations via intent_script.

The Wyoming protocol is really where I think reusability for a general voice assistant will come from. The list of projects is growing, but there are currently no intent services. I have a few in the works that will be alternatives for the default HA conversation agent; I’m trying to resurrect the old SnipsNLU, and also play around with local LLMs :robot:

@brunkj How did you end up building your joke and reminder skills for Rhasspy?

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rhasspy-hermes apps. I am going to look into the stuff mentioned above! Thanks :slight_smile:

Another rhasspy skill/intent I have setup is currently i have a slot program that queries my tautulli system and returns every movie name i have in my library. I can then tell rhasspy to play that movie on my kodi setup. So that way the voice assistant has a dictionary of every movie i have, and an intent around that dictionary. Something like that MAY be possible in home assistant, but I don’t know how you would get that entire dictionary of terms loaded as possible titles.

That’s another small example of my confusion on how it’s being built with HA. But as i mentioned above, I need to look more into the intent_script stuff. I was just under the assumption that rhasspy3 or something similar was going to be able to be plugged in as an intent engine type of thing.

Thank you for helping me understand where things are :slight_smile:

I guess you missed the detail that in:

both these are Rhasspy Github modules, rather than being specific to HA :wink:


I think many of us are also wondering how these components will fit together and be used - for instance all my automations are in Node-RED, and one day soon I will have to work out how to link to/from them.

Oh, and I like the concept of being able to query your database of movie titles, and tell rhasspy to play that on kodi. :star_struck:

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