As we noted in the latest smart home review, voice assistants are ubiquitous. They have the potential to add a lot of convenience to our lives and sometimes make them safer, for example while driving. A voice assistant is also an ideal solution for your smart home. After all, a voice command is easy to say and, if your assistant has heard you well, usually faster than operating your equipment via an app on your smartphone that still has to come out of your pocket.
The rapid rise of voice assistants does have a downside. The technology requires quite a bit of processing power to function properly and smoothly, and that power is almost always obtained from the cloud by the commercially available voice assistants. This gives ‘someone else’s computer’ quite a lot of access to your life and that does not depend on how often you use the voice assistant. The underlying platform is connected to your equipment to operate it and is therefore continuously aware of the status of those devices.
If you prefer to keep your data private, but still use voice assistance, you will have to set this up locally. We have seen the last few months partly due to the efforts of Nabu House, the company behind Home Assistant, is a big shift in how feasible building local voice assistance is. Home Assistant has been expanded in recent months with additional functions to properly support voice assistance. The open source package Rhasspy is also taking major steps forward in development (again). This is interesting for users of other platforms, such as OpenHAB, Domoticz and platforms that integrate Node-Red.
Voice assistance requires a combination of software and hardware. In the latter area, there are more and more ready-made modules available that allow you to relatively easily equip a microcontroller or single-board computer with the right components, such as a microphone array and a speaker.
High time to enter the world of local speech recognition to see what the state of the art is. We look at some hardware options to build your own satellite voice assistant. In addition, in this review we look at two aforementioned voice assistant platforms, Home Assistant and Rhasspy, which you can run locally without a cloud. How easy are these to set up and are the results acceptable enough to justify the investment in time and hardware?
2023-10-16 04:00:00
#Voice #assistance #cloud #Protect #privacy #DIY
