“Cool device. Does a lot of things well. Looks good. Only downside is you can't set a custom wake word so stuck with the stock ones. Hence 1 star off. It would be perfect if I could set my own wake word.”
“I wanted to try one of these to see how they were doing, and appreciate that this is a technology preview, treating it as such. My main issue with using it, after rebooting my HA install a few times so that everything bedded in properly, was that it didn't seem well-versed in my slightly northern English. I'd ask it to do tasks that Siri has no problems with, integrating well with HA, but nothing seemed to happen until I went into the rest of the house, where all the lights were blazing in the middle of the day. I kept trying, and failing, and haven't yet figured out how to get it to play music on my PC's 5.1 speakers (I have a 2nd input), but it seems to cope with simple stuff like weather, and could cope with temperatures from sensors in other rooms ok. I'm using it locally on a Pi400 with an SSD, as I don't have a Cloud contract for cost reasons, so I imagine the responses might be a bit better. I'll keep coming back to it from time-to-time, but for now I still have Siri to work with on a daily basis, but I look forward to seeing this progress. It was worth a punt for the fun of it, so I don't regret diving in as an inquisitive non-coder with a liking for tech.”
“I've used Home Assistant for sometime and am now trying to transition away from Google speakers. Home Assistant Voice PE has worked better than I expected, local automations are fast and cloud questions work well, once optimized this picks up your voice well and replies clearly. The button on the top and audio out are also a great feature and I'm sure to buy more of these devices shortly.”
“I bought this as part of a proof of concept lab for running home assistant with a local LLM running on my main PC all over a wireless LAN connection. Meanwhile I installed docker/portainer/homeassistant on a new PI5 16Gig. I'm also running the STT/TTS and custom wakeword all on that PI whilst controlling it with the HAV.
The above works and proves that with the right hardware will be a viable voice assistant but in this form its quite slow at 8-11seconds to get a reply to a basic question or request to turn on a light for example. This is pretty much the same with a 24b and 7b model so I'm fairly sure my 24gig RAM GPU isn't the bottleneck here. Possibly the pi, possibly the HAV unit.
I can't wait to see how this would work with a post "preview" effort :)”
“Can't wait for this technology to get better. The ability for open mic/speaker Wyoming protocol speakers to use local LLMs like deep seek with voice commands and home assistant is great. I bought this as a proof of concept for a mini pc llm but as they get better I can see them easily replacing Alexa's and Google devices in people's houses. A little pricey for what it is, but again with more manufacturing numbers I'm sure that figure will come down.”
