If you are using Home Assistant and you want a free, open-source and 100% on-device solution to build a Voice AI you can take a look at what we build at Snips https://snips.ai
You can build your Voice AI in English, French, German, and soon Japanese and Korean, with more European languages coming
It runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 and will be 100% free for makers
Perhaps I didn't search well enough, but is there a way to buy a ready-made snips device? Like I would buy an Amazon Echo?
I'd be keen to use something like Snips instead of Alexa, but I'm not too sure I have the time and energy to solder things, or even just attach wires to some connector... Or even just figure out which part to order from where... And I already have a pi3 running Home Assistant.
To me this is the biggest barrier of entry.
The 2nd one (which is the same pretty much), is convincing my wife to replace this thing[0] with this thing[1], and also preventing my 4 year old from messing with the wires...
We are working on this! You can buy any Raspberry Pi 3 and we have tutorials to show common hardware to use, but soon there will be a maker kit you can get from us too!
We recommend a Raspberry Pi 3 and a ReSpeaker2 microphone there is a list of materials you can find on this blog post, and please subscribe to our newsletter to learn about the kit
With the way voice assistants work these days (memorize these sentences, when you say them stuff will happen) along with the fact that people only use a few functions of their voice activated products, it makes a lot of sense to be able to pick and choose which commands to enable.
It also has the added benefit of being local/private/on-device.
I will definitely be using this for a project or two.
Awesome, we would love to see what you make with it, come see us on our Discord channel to talk and ask any question you have, and if you are using it in your home or to build cool interactions we would love to feature it on our site!
That's cool. I mostly wanted a quick REST API to use with IFTTT, without a ton of dependencies. Home Assistant looks interesting. Maybe I'll give it a try sometimes.
I'm currently rely on Google Home which allows me to remotely control things away from home. What are my options when I switch to Home Assistant? Can I still control things using Google Assistant? Can I still remotely control things without VPN back home?
Yea, I can access Home Assistant away from home via my web browser. I have NGINX setup which allows me to connect to Home Assistant running on my Raspberry Pi. Home Assistant is setup with password protection along with fail2ban as well.
You can also set it up with a hidden Tor address, VPN, no remote access, Apache proxy access, etc.
I also utilize Google Home & Amazon Echo Dots which are integrated into Home Assistant. LIFX & Z-Wave for lights, door sensors, motion sensors, etc.
You can build your Voice AI in English, French, German, and soon Japanese and Korean, with more European languages coming
It runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 and will be 100% free for makers