Home Assistant’s new hardware voice assistant answers to ‘Hey Jarvis’ and can work offline

There’s a new voice assistant in town, and this one can work locally in your home without phoning home to its corporate overloads. This week, the popular hobbyist smart home platform Home Assistant officially launched its first voice assistant hardware — Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition.

Built for the open-source smart home platform, Voice PE costs $59 and brings a locally controlled, privacy-focused voice assistant to Home Assistant in a plug-and-play package. Once connected to Home Assistant, you can use voice to control any connected device, with commands such as “Turn on the living room lights,” “Lock all the doors,” “Create a timer for 5 minutes,” and many more.

There have been other solutions before, but they were not so reliable, and of course the Google or Amazon based ones require the cloud access of these companies, and many do not like to have that channel open.

This is a hardware device (that does look pretty good) and seems to be pretty versatile. I think it could be well worth it, as long as it will get ongoing updates and not be replaced with some new model in the short term. Despite that, seeing it works fully offline, you should at least find it won’t ever be bricked or turned into a paper weight.

See theverge.com/2024/12/19/243251…
#Blog, #homeassistant, #privacy, #technology