The problem I have always had with voice control is that it just doesn’t really seem to fit into my home automation. I don’t want to give Home Assistant a verbal command to turn on the lights. I want it to detect that I’ve entered the room and set the lights to the appropriate scene automatically; I haven’t touched a light switch in weeks. For selecting an album or movie to play, it’s easier to use a menu on a screen than to try to explain it verbally.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m hugely in favor of anything that runs locally instead of using the “cloud.” I think that the majority of people running a home automation server want to tinker with it and streamline it to do things on its own. I want it to “read my mind.” The people who just want a basic solution probably aren’t going to set up HA.
Maybe I’m missing a use case for voice control?
Funny…I’m the exact opposite. I don’t want it to detect that I’ve entered the room and set the lights to the appropriate scene automatically. Unless it can detect when I don’t want to go into a dark room and be blinded by lights I didn’t want on, I want to control when it turns on. Unless it can determine that I’m only home from work for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, I don’t want it to adjust the heat settings. In other words, until it can actually read my mind, I want to be able to control it and tell it what I want when I actually want it.
I’m looking into an HA setup specifically to get away from Alexa and host everything locally. I may only want simple controls, but I want to truly control everything myself.
I loved being able to control the dimmer level or color of the lights using voices controls.
I set up a few IFTTT recipes to create lighting and music scenes for things like reading, conversation, movie watching, date night, party time, and a few others and triggered them with a voice command.
It was always a hit with whoever I brought over, but mostly it just did 4 or 5 things with one voice command.
You can have it set more intelligently than on/off.
For example, what I have (I’m excessive btw, so this is just one option) is a light sensor that tells me how light it is outside, and then combine that information with sunrise/sunset times.
I use that to set the color of the lighting (circadian lighting style), the light level, and a ramp time to the max brightness I’d want. For rooms where there is good daylight coming in, if the light coming in from daylight is bright enough, the lights lower their brightness (daylight harvesting approach).
This isn’t in every room at the moment, as some of my lights are not RGBW LEDs. Those with regular white LEDs just dim.
Is it perfectly set for your eyes? No, but you can tweak it. My wife likes it bright than me, so I set values that I could tolerate for a nice compromise.
No RGB? Then drop the circadian lighting, keep the rest.
No light sensors? There are some APIs available out there for solar radiation values you can use (openweathermap for example). Less accurate, but probably close enough for what you want.
TL;DR version: add more conditions, and get what you want.
You wake up one day with a bad headache, and bright light hurts your eyes. You can close the curtains, but every room is set to turn the lights on to the brightness that you usually prefer.
How do you manage something like this? Do you have to adjust everything with your phone and reset it when you feel better?
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My main use cases are Timers in Kitchen, Finding my wife’s phone, and turning off music.
My #1 use case is setting timers. My hands are messy in the kitchen, need to set 35 different timers to get the kids outta the house in the morning.
Even ignoring privacy arguments, I think that voice control is a great use case for running services locally - lower latency due to not having up upload your sample and the option of having it learn your accent is very attractive.
That said, voice control is irritatingly error-prone and seems to be slower than just reaching for the remote control. I agree that automatic stuff would be best, but some stuff you can’t have rules for.
Something that would be interesting is a more eye- and gesture-based system: I’m thinking something like you look at the camera and slice across your throat for stop or squeeze fingers together to reduce volume. This is definitely one to run locally, for privacy and performance reasons.
The majority of people do not have perfect whole house motion sensors setup to turn on and off lights. Congrats, you’re the 0.0001%.
Not everyone even wants lights to turn on just because the room is occupied.
Friends have voice stuff, it’s pretty annoying
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Right now, with some off-the-shelf gear and the patience to flash and fiddle, you can ask “Nabu” or “Jarvis” or any name you want to turn off some lights, set the thermostat, or run automations.
It’s not entirely fair to compare locally run, privacy-minded voice control to the “assistants” offered by globe-spanning tech companies with secondary motives.
While outgrowers are happy to leave behind the inconsistent behavior, privacy concerns, or limitations of their old systems, they can miss being able to just shout from anywhere in a room and have a device figure out their intent.
Here’s a look at what you can do today with your human voice and Home Assistant, what remains to be fixed and made easier, and how it got here.
“As it stands today, we’re not ready yet to tell people that our voice assistant is a replacement for Google/Amazon,” Schoutsen wrote.
All that said, it’s impressive how far Home Assistant has come since late 2022, when it made its pronouncement, despite not really having a clear path toward its end goal.
The original article contains 469 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’m pretty new to all this, I just got a smart light and hub, etc. With the idea of using voice commands on my iphone/ipad.
But I was really disappointed to find out that I can’t voice activate the command “living room light on”, because as soon as Siri hears this, it responds “oh you havent setup a homekit device”.
Homebridge is a way to get non-HomeKit devices into HomeKit. It’s what I am using for most of my stuff. It works pretty well in my opinion.
I used homebridge for a long time, but found maintaining it to be a bit of a chore. Home Assistant was easier to maintain and configure, thanks to its web-based interface. And it has a bridge to homekit that achieves basically everything that homebridge did. You may want to investigate it!
I don’t think Sonos gets enough credit for their local voice control capability. It can’t be integrated into home assistant to do anything beyond controlling the Sonos speakers, but I have been ABSOLUTELY blown away by how responsive the voice commands have been. Literally a 100% success rate after using it for a couple months now. It correctly interprets if you want to start/stop playing, can find music by the artist I want from Apple Music (not sure about other streaming services), and will correctly adjust playing status for a specific speaker if you say to adjust music on that speaker only - even if you command it from another room.
The best part - no bullshit worst responses about “by the way….” Like on Alexa. At most, you get a short response like “good choice” or “ok”.
Sonos isn’t cheap, but I would 100% buy them again every time because it just works.
Oh shit, I’m going to have to shop Sonos then
I never thought I’d be the kind of person to use voice commands, but it is so nice to tell it to turn on the radio while I’m cooking dinner!
I tried the local voice assistant on my Sonos a while back and did like how well it worked to play music but at the time it didn’t support Spotify so it was a no-go. Do they now?
Do you know whether it supports locations and timers? For example I can tell Alexa “Play Eminem in the Family Room for one hour”
Can confirm timer works - set a 5 minute timer for playing music in the family room).
Spotify does work with Sonos now (I don’t use it but I have my account set up with it), but voice control does not work with Spotify.
Thanks. Sorry for being unclear: I use Spotify on my Sonos speakers all the time but was concerned about Sonos Voice working with Spotify. I guess it’s still a “no”
FYI- I received an email the other day that sonos officially added voice control for Spotify!
Excellent! Thanks for posting: I’ll have to give it a try
Except it’s been in the news that they only support their products for 5 years after release. So as Apple and other streaming services update over the years, your Sonos will stop working.
I think an important correction here is that they say they will only commit to a minimum of 5 years of software updates after they stop selling a particular model.
Even then, there is no reason the speaker wouldn’t still work. To me, that sounds perfectly reasonable. There’s posts about a 15 year old play 5 speaker getting a firmware update within the last year even, so I think Sonos deserves credit where credit is due. They have a proven track record so far, but no doubt it’s something to keep an eye on going forward.
Sonos deserves credit where credit is due.
For five years. I’m not buying shit on a hope and a wish that they’ll still support it in 7 years. I’m old enough to know better.
I’ve been doing home automation for awhile now. Voice assistant is never anything I would consider. What problem does it solve that a button doesn’t do with less hassle?
Also, note automation. The whole point is for the house to do its thing with minimal interaction based on triggers and states. Everyone leaves? Turn off the lights, lock the doors, turn down the heat. TV comes on after dusk? Dim the living room lights if they are on. Going down the basement stairs? Turn on the lights. Cat just used the litter box? Turn on the hepa filter for a bit.
Heat pumps are more efficient maintaining the same temp over the course of the day rather than heating in bursts.
I have baseboard electric
I have a heat pump.
Can you manage your house without a voice assistant
I understand that this is useful for older people or the differently abled, and this solution is better than most, but according to me, please get up and turn the switch off, it’s not like we are living in humongous houses anyway, I don’t want anymore mics and camera with me than I already have
Nah, that ambient computing and “just speak things and they happen” interface, a thing of science fiction a couple decades ago, is amazing.
It’s a fantastic way to interface with your devices and you can be all grumpy about it but it’s way more convenient it a lot of cases.
I’m sure there was a version of you 100 years ago that said “don’t flip one of those switches, just fill up the oil and light the lamp. It’s not that hard”
You have a point, but there is a difference b/w something being convenient and something being lazy, sure if you use a light bulb instead if a candle it is smart and convenient, but in the direction we are headed, I am pretty sure we won’t ever leave our beds, with that comes a myriad of problems, some sort of movement is essential in our everyday life, you would also be much more likely be more active on your workouts probably if you stayed more active throughout the day if you use gym as an excuse
If only there was an alternative to voice-assisted house management.
Wife? :p
Ha ha ha casual sexism! I get it!
