“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.”
“Fantastic little device, works an absolute charm and combined with Home Assistant, the potential is incredible. Already I have some fantastic automations set up such as walking into the bedroom and having this device announce to me that my favourite TV show is available and would I like it turned on. A simple yes will turn the TV on and navigate to that channel. The speaker is loud and configurable via a dial on the top, the LED wheel shows exactly what the device is up to, such as listening, processing etc. Highly recommended, i will probably be buying another!”
