Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition

Homeassistant voice preview edition - review

I got 2 of them since my HA green box is upstairs in a closet and this allows me to experiment with voice on HA from anywhere I have USB power for it. I put one in my home office and configured it to use a LLM that I have running in the basement. The voice works very good with the LLM (I chose the smaller LLM to reduce latency). I have not tried playing music thru it but STT and TTS both seem to work as well as my google hubs.

Nice little device

This thing is very nice and a great value. The only thing that might need improvement are the mics, but I'm not sure. It seems like sometimes it doesn't pick-up my voice, but there are other things that could be causing the problem. And it would help if they would explain the connection process better, because that can be very confusing until you figure out what is going on.

Works better than expected

Way better than Alexa when you have a fallback LLM. The HA model is fine, but it is pretty rigid with commands. I'd love to see a higher-end one with nicer mics and a decent speaker for voice.