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If 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
by hamdingers 7mo ago
If 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.
- _spduchamp 7mo agoHow about a button? I'd prefer to physically press a button on an intercom box than having something churning away constantly processing sound.
- kortilla 7mo agoRules out a bunch of cases where your hands are busy handling ingredients in the kitchen, etc
- magarnicle 7mo agoPut it at foot level and kick it.
- pwillia7 7mo agoI'm in if I can embed it into my forearm
- hamdingers 7mo agoIn the mid 2000s I had a setup where some children's walkie talkie "spy watches" could be used to issue commands to a completely DIY, relay based smart home system. I'm looking forward to whenever my Pebble ships so I can recreate that experience with this: https://github.com/skylord123/pebble-home-assistant-ws https://github.com/skylord123/pebble-home-assistant-ws
- nickthegreek 7mo agoapple watch gets you close.
- hamdingers 7mo agoIf I have to go to a thing and push a button, I'd rather the button do the thing I wanted in the first place. Voice assistants are for when my hands are full or I don't want to get up. (I wrote more about my home automation philosophy in another comment[1]). Also I have all my voice assistant devices mounted to the ceiling 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47399909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47399909
- senkora 7mo agoWhy not use an easier to detect wake “word”, like two claps in quick succession? Or a couple of notes of a melody?
- hamdingers 7mo agoCan't clap if your hands are full and I would not subject my family to my attempts at delivering a melody. I haven't tried training my own wake word though, I'm tempted to see if it improves things.
- ethagnawl 7mo agoWhat's been surprising in my experience regarding the wake word is that it recognizes me (adult male) saying the wake word ~95% of the time. However, it only registers the rest of my family (women and children) ~30% of the time.
- vineyardmike 7mo agoI have no firsthand knowledge, but I’d strongly bet that the home-assistant effort to donate training data is mostly get adult males, and nearly zero children.
- ethagnawl 7mo agoOh, I'm sure you're right. I've had people in my personal life (non-technical; "AI enthusiasts") laugh at me over concerns about training bias but this is likely a real world example of it.
- stavros 7mo agoI think you can train your own wake word with microWakeWord but I've never done it.
- dghlsakjg 7mo agoThis was 2021 (so pre-llm), but I used to work for a company that gathered data for training voice commands (Alexa, Toyota, Sonos, were some clients). Basically, we paid people to read digital assistant scripts at scale. Your assumptions about training data do not match the demographics of data I collected. The majority of what our work revolved around was getting diversity into the training data. We specifically recruited kids, older folks, women, people with accented/dialected English and just about every variety of speech that we could get our hands on. The companies we worked with were insanely methodical about ensuring that different people were included.
- gmueckl 7mo agoYou are reporting on a deliberately curated effort vs. what I understand is effectively voluntary data donation without incentives. It's not surprising to me that the later dataset ends up biased due to the differences in sourcing.
- robotswantdata 7mo agoWhat about your wifi APs sensing which room you are in, with your choice of hilarious dance moves as the trigger ? Funky chicken for Gemini Penguin dance for OpenAI Claude?
- Crespyl 7mo ago> Claude? The Zoidberg Shuffle?
- acidburnNSA 7mo agoOn the plus side, mine misdetected a wake word during a funny conversation and said "Sorry, I can't find any area called _____[60 second repeat of funny conversation]___" and it made my family laugh harder than we've laughed in a really long time. I even went into the tts cache and saved the wav b/c it was sooo funny.
- freedomben 7mo agoHa, I had something similar happen as well that had us rolling. I think the hilarity was a result of the conversation snippet being taken completely out of context by the recording. Wish I'd saved the wav, I didn't even think of that :-(
- stavros 7mo agoTrain a custom wakeword with this? https://github.com/TaterTotterson/microWakeWord-Trainer-Nvidia-Docker https://github.com/TaterTotterson/microWakeWord-Trainer-Nvid...
- JohnTheNerd 7mo agoor if you have an Apple Silicon Mac, this: https://github.com/TaterTotterson/microWakeWord-Trainer-AppleSilicon https://github.com/TaterTotterson/microWakeWord-Trainer-Appl... I used it personally, did a lot of research (including asking questions to the creator of microWakeWord), and submitted an upstream PR (I think it's already merged), which improved the resulting model slightly. I imagine the Nvidia version is similar, but I don't have experience with it. I also noticed that the model is so small (~25000 parameters), the actual training part doesn't even noticably improve with the GPU, only the TTS voice generation really only uses it. if you are using this, I strongly recommend you create lots of personal samples with the recorder. I personally used 400, 200 from myself and 200 from my partner, with varying moods and in all the rooms we plan on using the assistant. I am considering re-training with more samples. it takes effort, but the resulting model seems to be well worth it.
- stavros 7mo agoOh wow, 200 each? I just deployed it to the device, but I trained with 10. I'll need to redo it if it doesn't work well, but so far so good.
- pjc50 7mo agoWake word detection in low power DSP is a not-quite-COTS product but definitely exists. I believe PC manufacturers are looking at adding it to laptops soon, precisely to use with AI assistants.
- homeonthemtn 7mo agoHow are you using Gemini in HA?
- lostmsu 7mo agoWhy do you even need a wake word? Have a model look at full transcript and decide when to engage.