[lolinder]

I've heard horror stories and have held off so far in 'upgrading'. In the end I don't really want the fully flexible responses people are leaning into with these llm tools. All I want is to be able to give a precise instruction with my voice and have the machine reliably perform the action that it performed the last time I gave that instruction.

Since that seems to be an increasingly niche desire (at least as far as the product managers are concerned), I've been looking more and more seriously at setting up my own local voice assistant. My main barrier has been hardware—the mic arrays in the Home devices are surprisingly good and hard to beat with cheap off-the-shelf components, and you need a good mic for good STT.

[lancesells]

Yeah, I would like Siri to actually play the album I asked for and not something completely different phonetically from what I asked. Or even when I set an alarm and not be told "I can't connect to the internet right now" while I'm using my laptop connected to the internet. Or if my internet is down to actually use the speakers that I bought as speakers.

The hardware is really well done but the software is either over or under-engineered to a stupid degree.