diff --git a/source/_posts/2024-12-19-voice-chapter-8-assist-in-the-home.markdown b/source/_posts/2024-12-19-voice-chapter-8-assist-in-the-home.markdown new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..7404e0d1d9eb --- /dev/null +++ b/source/_posts/2024-12-19-voice-chapter-8-assist-in-the-home.markdown @@ -0,0 +1,129 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: "Voice Chapter 8 - Assist in the home today" +description: "All the things you can do with Assist today, along with the state of our development, limitations, and where you can help." +date: 2024-12-19 00:00:01 +date_formatted: "December 19, 2024" +author: Mike Hansen +comments: true +categories: Assist +og_image: /images/blog/2024-12-voice-chapter-8/art.png +--- + +Voice chapter 8 - Assist in the home today + +As you have probably already read, we launched our [Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition](/voice-pe/) today. The culmination of the past several years of open-source software progress on Home Assistant's home-grown voice assistant, [Assist](/voice_control/). A sizable group of dedicated developers has been working together on adding and honing its many features, and if it's been a while since you tried Assist, you should use this launch as a chance to jump back in and see the progress we've made. + +[Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition](/voice-pe/) has been launched to build on this work, continuing the momentum we've already built and accelerating our goal of not only matching the capabilities of existing voice assistants but surpassing them. We had an early production run of Voice Preview Edition (a preview preview 😉), and we tried to get them in the hands of as many of our language leaders and voice developers as possible - and we're already seeing the fruits of their efforts with language support improving over the past month alone! + +I'd like to highlight in this voice chapter all the things you can do with Assist today. I also want to give the state of our development, what the limitations are, and where your support can be best applied. + +### Table of Contents + +- [Assist in the home today](#assist-in-the-home-today) + - [Origins of Assist](#origins-of-assist) + - [Commands](#commands) + - [Timers](#timers) + - [Exposing devices and Aliases](#exposing-devices-and-aliases) + - [Room context](#room-context) + - [Wake words](#wake-words) +- [Speech Processing](#speech-processing) + - [Language support](#language-support) + - [Text-to-speech](#text-to-speech) + - [Speech-to-text](#speech-to-text) + - [AI and Assist](#ai-and-assist) +- [Conclusion](#conclusion) + + + +## Assist in the home today + +### Origins of Assist + +

Early Assist being used in chatEarly versions of Assist via chat - things have come a long way

+ +Voice control for Home Assistant goes back further than most people assume, with some of the groundwork we use today being [added as far back as 2017](/blog/2017/07/29/release-50/). The major turning point came when we refocused our efforts and declared 2023 the [Year of the Voice](/blog/2022/12/20/year-of-voice/). This was an effort to focus development and find areas where our community could make the most impact. During the Year of the Voice [Assist](/voice_control/) was added to voice, intents were improved, languages added, wake words were created, and we established great local and cloud options for running voice. Shortly after Year of the Voice many more features were added, including integrated AI, timers, and even better wake words. Year of the Voice got the ball rolling, and Voice Preview Edition will continue its momentum. + +### Commands + +[Assist](/voice_control/) is the underlying technology that allows Home Assistant to turn commands ("turn on the light") into Actions (`light.turn_on`). Commands, or as we call them *intents*, allow you to control pretty much every aspect of your smart home, including on, off, play, pause, next, open, close, and more. We also have intents that give you helpful information like what's the time, weather, temperature, and so on. Lastly, there are a bunch of other useful miscellaneous things, like adding items to a shopping list and setting timers. If you're interested, there is a [full list here](https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/intent_builtin/). + +### Timers + +
+ +
+ +When we [asked our community](https://community.home-assistant.io/t/poll-what-do-you-use-your-voice-assistant-for-what-do-you-expect-it-to-do-multiple-selections/693669) timers were a top-requested ability. You can not only set a timer, pause, increase, decrease or cancel it, but you can also set commands to [trigger after a set amount of time](/blog/2024/06/26/voice-chapter-7/#timers-control-devices), for example, "turn off the TV in 15 minutes". You can also just say "Stop" without a wake word, to silence the timer's alarm. On our Voice Preview Edition, when you set a timer the LED ring counts down the last seconds and flashes when it's done. + +### Exposing devices and Aliases + +This sets us apart from other voice assistants: we allow you to expose and effectively hide devices from your voice assistant. For example, you could choose not to expose a door lock but instead just expose the sensor that knows if the door is closed. It puts you in the driver's seat on what voice can do in your home. We also introduced aliases to allow you to give devices multiple names, allowing you to speak more naturally with Assist. + +### Room context + +If you tell your Assist hardware what room it is in and ensure other devices are organized by room, you can give commands like "turn off the lights", and without specifying anything, it will turn off the lights in the room you are in. This feature also works with media players (play/pause/next) and timers. + +### Wake words + +

Timer animation video
Our community is donating small amounts of time to improve wake words with our tool.
+ +Wake Words are the unique phrases that initiate a voice assistant to listen and start processing a command. Wake words originally had to be processed on Home Assistant via an add-on like openWakeWord, meaning the Assist hardware needed to continuously stream audio to Home Assistant. Shortly after Year of the Voice [microWakeWord](/blog/2024/02/21/voice-chapter-6/#microwakeword) was released, which brought wake word processing on-device for faster responses. It is improving fast thanks to our community using our [fast and easy tool](/blog/2024/10/24/wake-word-collective/) to donate samples of their voice. There is a growing list of wake words, and the on-device options include "Okay Nabu" (default and most reliable), "Hey Jarvis", and "Hey Mycroft". Both of these wake word engines were built by the Home Assistant community and are open source, giving the world two great free and open wake word engines! + +## Speech Processing + +

Timer animation videoThe Assist pipeline in all its glory + +Assist can't understand spoken words and needs something to take that audio and turn it into text - all this together is called an Assist pipeline. This speech processing is really CPU intensive, so it can't happen on the Voice Assistant Hardware, and sometimes your Home Assistant system can't even handle it. One important step we made was adding speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities to [Home Assistant Cloud](/cloud/), which allows low-powered Home Assistant hardware to offload speech processing to the cloud. Home Assistant Cloud doesn't store or use this data to train on - clouds don't get any more private than ours. It is also the most accurate and power-efficient way to process speech. We've put considerable effort into local speech processing, building the add-ons and a new protocol they use to speak to Home Assistant, but they are very reliant on language support from the community. + +### Language support + +

Our language checkerSee if your language is supported with our checker.

+ +Assist aims to support more languages than other voice assistants, and this has been a massive undertaking for our community - We need more help. The first step for language support is getting the commands (intents) right, and we have [over 25 major languages](https://home-assistant.github.io/intents/) that are ready to use today. Our wake words are also getting better at understanding different accents thanks to our [Wake Word Collective tool](https://ohf-voice.github.io/wake-word-collective/). + +### Text-to-speech + +We built our own text-to-speech system, [Piper](/integrations/piper/), and it now supports over 30 languages. It's a fast, local neural network-powered text-to-speech system that sounds great and can run on low-powered hardware (it's optimized for Pi4!). It was built with the voices of our community, and if you don't see your native tongue, [add your voice](https://github.com/rhasspy/piper/blob/master/TRAINING.md)! + +### Speech-to-text + +There is one area that holds back the rest of our language support more than others, and that's local speech-to-text. Building a full speech-to-text model needs big compute resources and terabytes of samples, which is currently outside our reach. We use [Whisper](/integrations/whisper/) for local speech-to-text processing, an open-source project from OpenAI, and we're grateful it exists. For some languages, it works great and doesn't require a lot of system resources to run well, but for others, you need a pretty beefy system to get acceptable results. In our opinion, only about 15 languages are ready to be run locally on reasonable hardware (an Intel N100 or better) - that's why before you begin dreaming up your perfect all-local setup, we recommend checking [language support](/voice-pe/#language-support). + +We're always looking for new solutions for low-powered hardware, and are now building another tool that uses much less complex sentence recognition. This could even run on a Raspberry Pi 4, but it would only be able to identify predefined sentences, so if you go off script you may need to call in an AI to help Assist understand your needs. Our language leaders are hard at work putting together the needed translations, but if you want to learn more visit [Rhasspy Speech](https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy-speech). + +In general, even when your language is supported, you'll almost always get better results from Home Assistant Cloud. Use the free trial to see what works best for you. Also, you can use both, we know someone using an automation to switch the Assist pipeline to an all local setup when their internet is down. + +### AI and Assist + +

Our default local conversation agent mixed with AI is great for natural language and speed

+ +Another aspect where we beat the competition hands down is the integration of AI into our voice assistant. You can choose from some of the biggest cloud AI providers like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude (paid accounts required). You can also run it locally via [Ollama](https://ollama.com/) if you have a modern graphics processor with enough VRAM, allowing you to build the most capable offline voice setup around. + +Our intents (Assist's built-in sentences) are getting better at understanding most commands, but AI processes commands in natural language, meaning if you get the device's name ever so slightly off, it can still figure things out. It also provides the ability to ask outside the built-in intents. For instance, if you tell it "It's a bit cold in here", it may raise the temperature on your thermostat, but it could forgo any home control and just tell you to put on a jacket - results are not yet consistent. More useful is its ability to take multiple sensors and provide context. For instance, you could ask it for an air quality report, and it could review the CO2 levels and tell you to open a window it observes is shut. All this is experimental, and having an AI control your home is not for everyone, but what's important is that you have the choice. + +## Conclusion + +So many new innovations and improvements for Assist have happened in the past couple of months, and this speaks to the power of having good hardware to build our software on. Voice Preview Edition is the best open voice hardware available today, and even with it only in the hands of a couple of hundred people today, it's making a noticeable difference. Whether that's writing code, improving language support, making blueprints, or even just reporting bugs. The momentum we will build having this in the hands of thousands will be game-changing - it's why we've declared that the era of open voice assistants has arrived. + +In the comments sections, we always have a couple of people saying, "but I don't use voice, what about improving (this or that)". The good news is that improving Assist and Home Assistant's other features are already happening in tandem (check out [our roadmap](/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2/) for the complete picture of our priorities). In the end, only a fraction of our development goes towards voice, and our budget is what Amazon's voice team probably spends on pizza parties 😆. A great side effect is the problems we're solving with voice are benefiting other parts of Home Assistant, for example, our integration of AI was driven by voice. + +We really think voice is an integral part of a well-rounded smart home ecosystem. It's especially important for improving the accessibility of home control to all members of the household. There needs to be real options in the space, most importantly ones that give you full control and a real choice on privacy. + +### Home Assistant Voice Preview is available at retailers today, + +
+ Voice Preview Edition with packaging +
+ +
+ + buy now + +
diff --git a/source/_posts/2024-12-19-voice-preview-edition-the-era-of-open-voice.markdown b/source/_posts/2024-12-19-voice-preview-edition-the-era-of-open-voice.markdown new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..9c8f8325c884 --- /dev/null +++ b/source/_posts/2024-12-19-voice-preview-edition-the-era-of-open-voice.markdown @@ -0,0 +1,125 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: "The era of open voice assistants has arrived" +description: "Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition is the best way to get started with our open and privacy-focused voice assistant." +date: 2024-12-19 00:00:02 +date_formatted: "December 19, 2024" +author: Paulus Schoutsen +comments: true +categories: + - Announcements + - Assist +og_image: /images/blog/2024-12-vpe/art.jpg +--- + + + +**TL;DR: [Check out the product page](/voice-pe/)** + +We all deserve a voice assistant that doesn't harvest our data and arbitrarily limit features. In the same way Home Assistant made private and local home automation a viable option, we believe the same can, and must be done for voice assistants. + +Since we began developing our open-source voice assistant for Home Assistant, one key element has been missing - great hardware that's simple to set up and use. Hardware that hears you, gives you clear feedback, and seamlessly fits into the home. Affordable and high-quality voice hardware will let more people join in on its development and allow anyone to *preview* the future of voice assistants today. Setting a standard for the next several years to base our development around. + +

Voice Preview Edition with packaging

+ +We're launching [Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition](/voice-pe/) to help accelerate our goal of not only matching the capabilities of existing voice assistants but surpassing them. This is inevitable: They'll focus their efforts on monetizing voice, while our community will be focused on improving open and private voice. We'll support the languages big tech ignores and provide a real choice in how you run voice in your home. + +**The era of open, private voice assistants begins now, and we'd love for you to be part of it.** + +### Table of contents + +- [Introducing Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition](#introducing-home-assistant-voice-preview-edition) + - [Why Preview Edition](#why-preview-edition) + - [Built for Home Assistant](#built-for-home-assistant) + - [Advanced audio processing](#advanced-audio-processing) + - [Bringing choice to voice](#bringing-choice-to-voice) + - [Fully open and customizable](#fully-open-and-customizable) + - [Community-driven](#community-driven) +- [Conclusion](#conclusion) + - [See what voice can do today](#see-what-voice-can-do-today) + + + +## Introducing Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition + +Voice Preview Edition with packaging + +Our main goal with Voice Preview Edition was to make the best hardware to get started with [Assist](/voice_control/), Home Assistant's built-in voice assistant. If you're already using other third-party hardware to run Assist, this will be a big upgrade. We prioritized its ability to hear commands, giving it an industry-leading dedicated audio processor and dual microphones - I'm always blown away by how well it picks up my voice around the room. + +Next, we ensured it would blend into the home, giving it a sleek but unobtrusive design. That's not to say it doesn't have flair. When you get your hands on Voice Preview Edition the first thing you'll notice is its premium-feeling injection-molded shell, which is semi-transparent, just like your favorite '90s tech. The LED ring is also really eye-catching, and you can customize it to your heart's content from full gamer RGB to subtle glow. + +
+3 different views of Voice Preview Edition +
+ +It's hard to convey how nice the rotary dial is to use; its subtle clicks paired with LED animations are hard not to play with. Most importantly, the dial lets anyone in your home intuitively adjust the volume. The same can be said for the multipurpose button and mute switch (which physically cuts power to the microphone for ultimate privacy). We knew for it to work best, it needed to be out in the open, and let's just say that [Home Approval Factor](https://newsletter.openhomefoundation.org/open-home-approval-factor/#:~:text=2023.1%20release%20notes.-,Home%20Approval%20Factor,-We%20have%20a) was very front of mind when designing it. + +We also worked hard to keep the price affordable and comparable to other voice assistant hardware at just $59 (that's the recommended MSRP, and pricing will vary by retailer). This isn't a preorder, it's available now! + +
+Voice Preview Edition price +
+ +
+ + buy now + +
+ +### Why Preview Edition + +For some, our voice assistant is all they need; they just want to say a couple of commands, set timers, manage their shopping list, and control their most used devices. For others, we understand they want to ask their voice assistant to make whale sounds or to tell them how tall Taylor Swift is - this voice assistant doesn't entirely do those things ([yet](/voice_control/assist_create_open_ai_personality/)). We think there is still more we can do before this is ready for every home, and until then, we'll be selling this *Preview* of the future of voice assistants. We've built the best hardware on the market, and set a new standard for the coming years, allowing us to focus our development as we prepare our voice assistant for every home. Taking back our privacy isn't for everyone - it's a journey - and we want as many people as possible to join us early and make it better. + +### Built for Home Assistant + +Many other voice assistants work with Home Assistant, but this one was *built* for Home Assistant. Unlike other voice hardware that can work with Assist, this doesn't require flashing firmware or any assembly. You plug it into power, and it is seamlessly discovered by Home Assistant. A wizard instantly starts helping you set up your voice assistant, but critically, if you haven't used voice before, it will quickly guide you through what you need to get the best experience. + +

Video of Assist wizardGet up and running with Voice Preview Edition in minutes with our new wizard + +This is not a DIY product. We've worked to make the experience as smooth as possible, with easy and fast updates and settings you can manage from the Home Assistant UI. + +### Advanced audio processing + +If you have been following our work on voice, you know we've tried a lot of different voice assistant hardware. Most available Assist-capable hardware is bad at its most important job - hearing your voice and then providing audiovisual feedback. That was really what drove us to build Voice Preview Edition. + +

Voice Preview Editions mics and audio processors effortlessly hear commands through loud music it is playing

+ +Our Assist software could only do so much with substandard audio, and its functionality is massively improved with clear audio. The dual microphones combined with the XMOS audio processing chip are what makes it so capable. Together, they allow Voice Preview Edition to have echo cancellation, stationary noise removal, and auto gain control, which all adds up to clearer audio. This combined with an ESP32-S3 with 8 MB of octal PSRAM - one of the fastest ESP and RAM combinations available - makes for an incredibly responsive device. This is the best Assist hardware you can buy today, and it will continue to give a great experience as Assist's feature set expands in the years to come. + +### Bringing choice to voice + +Assist can do something almost no other voice assistant can achieve - *it can run without the internet* 🤯. You can speak to your Voice Preview Edition, and those commands can be processed completely within the walls of your home. At the time of writing this, there are some pretty big caveats, specifically that you need to speak a [supported language](/voice-pe/#language-support) and have pretty powerful hardware to run it (we recommend a Home Assistant system running on an Intel N100 or better). + +

graphic of local vs cloudDiagram of cloud vs local speech processing

+ +If you use low-powered Home Assistant hardware, there is an easy and affordable internet-based solution; [Home Assistant Cloud](/cloud/). This privacy-focused service allows you to offload your speech-to-text and text-to-speech processing, all while being very responsive and keeping your energy bill low. Speech-to-text is the harder of the two to run locally, and our cloud processing is almost always more accurate for more languages (visit our [language support checker here](/voice-pe/#language-support)). + +Our goal is for Assist to run easily, affordably, and fully locally for all languages. As someone who has seen the rapid development of this technology over the past several years, I'm optimistic that this will happen, but until then, many languages have a good range of choices that provide strong privacy. + +### Fully open and customizable + +

Some interesting cartoon-inspired 3D prints for Voice Preview EditionWe are sharing the design files if you want to 3D print a new case... these ones were inevitable

+ +We're not just launching a new product, ***we're open sourcing all of it***. We built this for the Home Assistant community. Our community doesn't want a single voice assistant, they want the one that works for them -- they want choice. Creating a voice assistant is hard, and until now, parts of the solution were locked behind expensive licenses and proprietary software. With Voice Preview Edition being open source, we hope to bootstrap an ecosystem of voice assistants. + +We tried to make every aspect of Voice Preview Edition customizable, which is actually pretty easy when you're working hand-in-hand with ESPHome and Home Assistant. It works great with the stock settings, but if you're so inclined, you can customize the Assist software, ESP32 firmware, and XMOS firmware. + +

Voice Preview Edition with packagingConnecting Grove sensors allows you to use your Voice Preview Edition as a more traditional ESPHome device - here is it acting as a voice assistant and air monitor.

+ +We also made the hardware easy to modify, inside and out. For instance, the included speaker is for alerts and voice prompts, but if you want to use it as a media player, connect a speaker to the included 3.5mm headphone jack and control it with software like [Music Assistant](https://music-assistant.io/). The included DAC is very clean and capable of streaming lossless audio. It can also be used as a very capable ESP32 device. On the bottom of the device is a [Grove port](https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/Grove_System/) (concealed under a cover that can be permanently removed), which allows you to connect a large ecosystem of sensors and accessories. + +We've also made it quite painless to open, with easy-to-access screws and no clips. We even included exposed pads on the circuit board to make modifying it more straightforward. We're providing all the [3D files](https://voice-pe.home-assistant.io/resources/) so you can print your own components... even cartoon character-inspired ones. We're not here to dictate what you can and can't do with your device, and we tried our best to stay out of your way. + +### Community-driven + +The beauty of Home Assistant and ESPHome is that you are never alone when fixing an issue or adding a feature. We made this device so the community could start working more closely together on voice; we even considered calling it the *Community* edition. Ultimately, it is the community driving forward voice - either by taking part in its development or supporting its development by buying official hardware or Home Assistant Cloud. So much has already been done for voice, and I can't wait to see the advancements we make together. + +## Conclusion + +Home Assistant ~~values~~ champions choice. Today, we're providing one of the best choices for voice hardware. One that is truly private and totally open. I'm so proud of the team for building such a great working and feeling piece of hardware - this is a really big leap for voice hardware. I expect it to be the hardware benchmark for open-voice projects for years to come. I would also like to thank our language leaders who are expanding the reach of this project, our testers of this Preview Edition, and anyone who has joined in our voice work over the past years. + +The hardware really is only half the picture, and it's the software that really brings this all together. Mike Hansen has just written the [Voice Chapter 8 blog](/blog/2024/12/19/voice-chapter-8-assist-in-the-home/) to accompany this launch, and this explains all the things we've built over the past two years to make Assist work in the home today. He also highlights everything that Voice Preview Edition was built to help accelerate development. + +### [See what voice can do today](/blog/2024/12/19/voice-chapter-8-assist-in-the-home/) diff --git a/source/images/blog/2024-12-voice-chapter-8/art.png b/source/images/blog/2024-12-voice-chapter-8/art.png new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..9255de5eb593 Binary files /dev/null and b/source/images/blog/2024-12-voice-chapter-8/art.png differ diff --git a/source/images/blog/2024-12-voice-chapter-8/assist.png b/source/images/blog/2024-12-voice-chapter-8/assist.png new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..a80d8ec74a16 Binary files /dev/null and b/source/images/blog/2024-12-voice-chapter-8/assist.png differ diff --git a/source/images/blog/2024-12-voice-chapter-8/buy-now.png b/source/images/blog/2024-12-voice-chapter-8/buy-now.png new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..f2bbc45644d3 Binary files /dev/null and b/source/images/blog/2024-12-voice-chapter-8/buy-now.png differ diff --git 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