“It is an easy install in home assistant via the esphome ready made projects page, the internal speaker is very quiet maybe a future version could have a external sound port/socket of some description, you can get around this by sending the audio to another device but it's not straight forward, but it works as described and fun to use.”
“I was hoping, maybe naively, that this could be used as a smart speaker for Home Assistant. The speaker is too quiet, however, and the microphone doesn't hear me very well from more than a few feet away. I wish it had a louder speaker and/or a 3.5mm plug for external speakers.
All in all I’m satisfied with the device, just set your expectations accordingly.”
“Bought this to use with my Home Assistant set up - the device feels robust and was easy to set up out of the box, with the help of some video guides on YouTube. Microphone appears to have good sensitivity, but it's worth bearing in mind that the speaker is very quiet - it can really only be used for testing responses to the spoken inputs.”
“As far as a device for testing its pretty good, used it to test home assistant voice assist and i was pleasantly surprised.
Good for testing but wont make it from dev to live as the speaker is quite quiet”
“The reason for buying the Atom Echo was to add local voice control to Home Assistant. While updating the software is pretty straight forward using online examples, the microphone in the Echo is tiny, making it pretty useless for family use!
It has I2C connections on the base, which should mean I could add an extra microphone, but the documentation says doing so would damage the internal mechanism. Contacting the manufacturer, they say "If you need an external microphone, AtomS3+Atomic Speaker Base would be a better choice". Comparitavely, adding an external speaker (or better, a jack cable to connect to an amplifier) is a pretty simple matter of soldering two wires.”
