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My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
- dewey 7mo agoTheir first version is most likely already 10x better than Siri. > Understands when it is in a particular area and does not ask “which light?” when there is only one light in the area, but does correctly ask when there are multiple of the device type in the given area.
- alex_young 7mo agoOne of my favorite episodes: I set 2 timers for the same thing somehow. I then tried to cancel one of them. >“Siri, cancel the second timer” “You have 2 timers running, would you like me to cancel one of them?” >“Yes” “Yes is an English rock band from the 70s…” >“Siri, please cancel the timer with 2 minutes and 10 seconds on it” “Would you like me to cancel the timer with 2 minutes and 8 seconds on it?” >“Yes” “Yes is an English rock band from the 70s…” Eventually they both rang and she listened when I said stop.
- 0_____0 7mo ago> "Stop" is a song by English girl group the Spice Girls from their second studio album, Spiceworld (1997).
- abroadwin 7mo agoMy favorite is when I ask Siri to set a timer and get back "there are no timers running."
- Skidaddle 7mo agoMy other favorite is when I ask Siri to set a timer on my watch and it does a web search.
- sanswork 7mo agoMy favourite is when I ask siri to stop the alarm(that is currently going off) and it decides to disable my morning wake up alarm but keep the current alarm going off.
- jazzyjackson 7mo ago“Siri stop” “There’s nothing to stop” > me, suddenly aware of how the AI takeover will happen
- xp84 7mo agoHelping my kid get ready for shower I had this exchange: Me: "Text Jane Would you mind dropping down the robe and underpants" Siri: Sends Jane "Would you mind dropping down" Me: rolls eyes "Text Jane robe and underpants" Siri: "I don't see a Jane Robe in your contacts." Me: wishes I could drown Siri in the bathtub It's wild to me that Apple got the ability to do the actual speech-to-text part pretty much 100% solved more than half a decade ago, yet struggles in 2026 to turn streams of very simple, correctly-transcribed text into intents in ways that even a local model can figure out. Siri is good STT, a bunch of serviceable APIs that can control lots of stuff, with the digital equivalent of a brain-damaged cat sitting at the center of it guaranteeing the worst possible experience.
- ted_dunning 7mo agoAt that point I would be very impressed if you could remember what the timers are for.
- phatskat 7mo agoIt’s wild how many of you have issues with Siri - and to be clear I’m not here to discount those issues, and I very much believe all of the anecdotes here. For me, Siri on either phone or watch is pretty much perfect - I don’t ask for much, mostly timers or making reminders. Google’s Nest Minis though? “Lights on” has a 50/50 shot of being a song of the same name, or similar name, or totally unrelated name. Same for “lights off”. If I don’t annunciate “play rain sounds” clearly enough I get an album called “Rain Songs” that is very much NOT calming for bed time. It doesn’t help that none of these understand that if I whisper a command, it should respond quietly - honestly the siris and nests and alexas all got like one iteration and then stopped it feels like. I want more features but less LLM. I want more control, and more predictability. Eg if every night around 1am I say “play rain sounds” my god just learn that I’m not, in all likelihood, asking to hear an album I’ve never listened to!
- yanis_t 7mo agoI'm still waiting till the promise of voice AI that was showed during the OpenAI demo in 2024 turn real somehow. It's not clear to me, why there has been zero progress since then.
- anvevoice 7mo ago[dead]
- j45 7mo agoWhat tech can do vs applying it requires it often to be configured and packaged to be usable in that way.
- phito 7mo agoIt also needs to work at least 99% of the time if not more. Not easy to do this with indeterministic models.
- recursive 7mo agoIf my lights and heat were 99% reliable, I'd be getting new lights and heat.
- bigstrat2003 7mo agoIn those cases yeah, 99% isn't reliable enough. I'm not going to tolerate having power down for 3 days out of the year. But in fairness, home automation is less critical than that so 99% reliability is still acceptable to me. I don't think LLMs are anywhere near that, though, nor is there any sign of them getting there any time soon. So it does concern me to use an LLM as the backbone of home automation.
- bombcar 7mo agoI took 99% reliable as meaning not having to repeat the command, which given that Siri is something like 50% reliable by that metric, 99% sounds like heaven.
- voidUpdate 7mo agoDo people like talking to voice assistants? I've used one occasionally (mostly for timers when I'm cooking), but most of the time it would be faster for me to just do it myself, and feels much less awkward than talking to empty air, asking it to do things for me. It might be because I just really don't like making more noise than I have to (Yes, I appreciate that some people may be disabled in such a way that it makes sense to use voice assistants, eg motor problems)
- freeone3000 7mo agoI use it frequently for reminders and calendar events when not at a computer, as voice is faster than the mobile interface (with so many screens) for setting something up
- RankingMember 7mo agoI love it for lists- like my hands are full making something in the kitchen and I can just tell it to add things to my grocery list as soon as I notice I'm out of something.
- hamdingers 7mo agoI consider each time I need to pull out my phone and "do it myself" to be a failure of my smart home system. If a light cannot be automatically on when I need it (like a motion sensor) or controlled with a dedicated button within arms reach (like a remote on my desk) then the third best option is one that lets me control it without interrupting what I'm doing, moving from where I am, using my hands, or possessing anything (a voice assistant).
- voidUpdate 7mo agoDo you not just turn the light on when you go in a room, and turn it off again when you go out? All the rooms in my flat have switches next to the door
- hamdingers 7mo agoYes, that would be a button within arms reach, something I explicitly prefer over the voice assistant. I use them frequently. I don't have just one light per room though, some spaces like my workshop or living room have a lot of lighting options, and flitting around the room flipping a bunch of switches is clumsy and unnecessary. The preference is always towards automation (e.g. when I play a movie in Jellyfin, the lights dim) but there are situations where I just need to ask for the workbench light.
- gausswho 7mo agoThis is five months old now. Any substantial changes to the recommended setup?
- nacs 7mo agoIt looks like the author has kept it updated since then. They mention the "Qwen3.5 (35B)" model for example which was released around 2 weeks ago.
- Insanity 7mo agoFor some anecdata, I've set up Qwen3.5 on a RX 7900XTX last weekend. It runs fine, did some simple coding prompts and got responses in 15-30 seconds. It's my first foray into running models locally just to see what's possible, and I guess I'm happily surprised so far. Also, the entire setup was done through Codex. I asked Codex to figure out how to run models locally given my architecture (Ubuntu, AMD GPU). It told me which steps to apply and I hit zero snags.
- olivercoleai 7mo ago[dead]
- hamdingers 7mo agoIf you're less concerned about privacy, I use Gemini 2.5 Flash for this and it's exceptionally good and fast as a HA assistant while being much cheaper than the electricity that would be needed to keep a 3090 awake. The thing that kills this for me (and they even mentioned it) is wake word detection. I have both the HA voice preview and FPH Satellite1 devices, plus have experimented with a few other options like a Raspberry Pi with a conference mic. Somehow nothing is even 50% good as my Echo devices at picking up the wake word. The assistant itself is far better, but that doesn't matter if it takes 2-3 tries to get it to listen to you. If someone solves this problem with open hardware I'll be immediately buying several.
- jcims 7mo agoI have a feeling beamforming microphone arrays might help here, something like this could improve the audio being processed substantially - https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/uma-8-microphone-array https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/uma-8-m....
- IshKebab 7mo agoAlexa devices have these (or used to at least), but Google Home's never did. So it shouldn't be necessary.
- jcims 7mo agoYeah a small (ideally personalized) wakeword model would probably outperform just about any audio wizardry.
- ethagnawl 7mo agoThat's a good call. I have a PS3(?) mic/camera that I was using when I was running the original Mycroft project on a Pi. I wonder if that would help with the inbuilt HA mic not waking for most of my family, most of the time. I will have to look at my VA Preview device and its specs later because I'm not sure if you can connect an external mic to it out-of-the-box.
- 7mo ago
- daveoc64 7mo agoI've recently purchased a couple of the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition devices, and they leave a lot to be desired. The wake word detection isn't great, and the audio quality is abysmal (for voice responses, not music). Amazon has ruined their Alexa and Echo devices with ads and annoying nag messages. I'd really like an open alternative, but the basics are lacking right now.
- touristtam 7mo agoCan those devices (Amazon) be _jail broken_? I was just wondering that this morning while taking a shower.
- locao 7mo agoYoutube is trying to push me to watch a video about jail breaking the Echo Show for a week now. I didn't watch it, but it's probably easy to find.
- vineyardmike 7mo agoGenerally no. Big tech companies have gotten good at locking down devices to the boot loader. Some of the signing keys for certain OTA versions have leaked, but you can’t rely on that. Some of the devices contain browsers, and people have set up hacky ways to turn them into thin clients through that, but it’s not particularly reliable IME. I heard some Chinese brands which made similar hardware for Chinese consumers don’t lock their devices down, letting you flash an open install of Android on them, but I haven’t seen anyone try that IRL.
- mrpf1ster 7mo agoYes https://xdaforums.com/t/unlock-root-twrp-unbrick-amazon-echo-show-5-2nd-gen-2021-cronos.4772596/ https://xdaforums.com/t/unlock-root-twrp-unbrick-amazon-echo...
- tkems 7mo agoOne that I have been experimenting with is using analog phones (including rotary ones!) to act as the satellites. I live in an older home and have phone jacks in most of the rooms already so I only had to use a single analog telephone adapter. [0] The downside is I don't have wake word support, but it makes it more private and I don't find myself missing my smart speakers that much. At some point I would like to also support other types of calls on the phones, but for now I need to get an LLM hooked up to it. [0] https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/worlds-most-private-voice-assistant https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/worlds-most-priv...
- Obscurity4340 7mo agoI wish I was remotely closer to being this kind of hacker :(
- StevenNunez 7mo agoI believe in you.
- aplomb1026 7mo ago[dead]
- anvevoice 7mo ago[dead]
- ljclifford 7mo agoactually the hardest part of a locally hosted voice assistant isn't the llm. it's making the tts tolerable to actually talk to every day. the core issue is prosody: kokoro and piper are trained on read speech, but conversational responses have shorter breath groups and different stress patterns on function words. that's why numbers, addresses, and hedged phrases sound off even when everything else works. the fix is training data composition. conversational and read speech have different prosody distributions and models don't generalize across them. for self-hosted, coqui xtts-v2 [1] is worth trying if you want more natural english output than kokoro. btw i'm lily, cofounder of rime [2]. we're solving this for business voice agents at scale, not really the personal home assistant use case, but the underlying problem is the same. [1] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS [2] https://rime.ai https://rime.ai
- cdcarter 7mo ago80% of my home voice assistant requests really need no response other than an affirmative sound effect.
- nickthegreek 7mo ago100% agree. I dont want a Yes, Got it, Will do or even worse, I have turned on the Bedroom Light. I want soft success ding or a low failure boop.
- colechristensen 7mo agoStar Trek got it right. two beeps, "Low High" = yup, "High Low" = nope
- TeMPOraL 7mo agoAlso "High High" == affirmative.
- ffsm8 7mo agowhy would you want an audio notification for a light? it either turns on and it worked or it doesnt turn on. i see no value in having a ding or anything of the kind if i imagine constant dinging whenever i enter a room and the motion sensor toggles the light innit i'd go mad
- xrd 7mo agoI've been having a lot of fun using my old Mycroft AI device. Neon is the new software package. It didn't solve the issues highlighted in this thread, but it is a fun open device to hack on. I wrote a little web app that will speak in the standard voice and say things like "hey kids, I'm AI and know everything, and your dad is really cool." They love to yell at me when I do that.
- kbuck 7mo agoI bought a Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition to try out. It's surprisingly good, but still falls short when compared to Google Home speakers: - Wake word detection isn't as good as the Google Homes (more false positives, more false negatives - so I can't just tune sensitivity). - Mic and speakers are both of poor quality in comparison to Google Home devices. - Flow is awkward. On a Google Home device, you can say "Okay Google, turn on the lights" with no pause. On the Voice PE, you have to say "Hey Mycroft [awkward pause while you wait for the acknowledgement noise] turn on the lights" - it seems like the Google Home devices start buffering immediately after the wake word, but the Voice PE doesn't. - Voice fingerprints don't exist, so this prevents the device from figuring out that two separate people are talking, or who is talking to it. - The device has poor identification of background noise, so if you talk to it while there is a TV playing speech in the background, it will continue to listen to the speech from the TV. It will eventually transcribe everything you said + everything from the TV and get confused. (This probably folds into the voice print thing as well.) On the upside, though: - Setting it up was really easy. - All of the entities I want to control with it are already available, without needing to export them or set them up separately in Google Home. - Despite all of the above complaints, the device is probably 80-90% of what I realistically need to use it day-to-day. If they throw a better speaker and mic array in, I'd likely be comfortable replacing all of my Google Homes.
- IX-103 7mo ago> it seems like the Google Home devices start buffering immediately after the wake word, but the Voice PE doesn't. Google Home devices are always buffering. The wake word just tells it to look back in the buffer and start processing.
- leftytak 7mo agoI picked up the same model, including the shipping to Canada, it ended up costing a lot for what it is. How are you hosting your LLM locally? I tried Ollama on an M4 Mac mini, even with a smaller LLM, the performance was very poor.
- quirk 7mo agoThe best fix I've made to any voice-mode AI is giving it a "done" word. So it has to listen for "pineapple" before it's allowed to process what I said. Just like radio comms (over and out).
- system2 7mo agoI think you will get tired of saying pineapple.
- leeeeeep1012 7mo agonice i run one dictatorflow.com that i open sourced lee101/voicetype
- myylogic 7mo ago[flagged]
- anvevoice 7mo ago[dead]
- jimmcslim 7mo agoI’m keen to see if Nabu Casa release an update to the Voice Assist hardware sometime soon. Something with the same fidelity and finish of the Amazon and Google options but open would be fantastic.
- Animats 7mo agoIs there a locally hosted voice assistant for Android phones? One available through F-Droid, if possible.
- MrDrMcCoy 7mo agoThere are a few. I'm currently using Transcribro.
- biang15343100 7mo ago[dead]
- Yanko_11 7mo ago[dead]
- JulianPembroke 7mo ago[dead]
- wei03288 7mo ago[dead]
- Slav_fixflex 7mo agoGreat write-up. I've been going down the self-hosted rabbit hole too – started with just a VPS, ended up building monitoring and security automation around it. The moment you start self-hosting seriously you realize how much 'invisible work' managed services were doing for you.
- Gri22lyBear 7mo agothe tts thing is a legit pain, right? i tried a few different voices and they all sounded so robotic. kokoro is interesting, i'll have to check that out.
- ldsjunior 7mo ago[dead]
- rdos 7mo ago> llama.cpp (previously Ollama) I almost fainted