| I bought a Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition to try out. It's surprisingly good, but still falls short when compared to Google Home speakers: - Wake word detection isn't as good as the Google Homes (more false positives, more false negatives - so I can't just tune sensitivity). - Mic and speakers are both of poor quality in comparison to Google Home devices. - Flow is awkward. On a Google Home device, you can say "Okay Google, turn on the lights" with no pause. On the Voice PE, you have to say "Hey Mycroft [awkward pause while you wait for the acknowledgement noise] turn on the lights" - it seems like the Google Home devices start buffering immediately after the wake word, but the Voice PE doesn't. - Voice fingerprints don't exist, so this prevents the device from figuring out that two separate people are talking, or who is talking to it. - The device has poor identification of background noise, so if you talk to it while there is a TV playing speech in the background, it will continue to listen to the speech from the TV. It will eventually transcribe everything you said + everything from the TV and get confused. (This probably folds into the voice print thing as well.) On the upside, though: - Setting it up was really easy. - All of the entities I want to control with it are already available, without needing to export them or set them up separately in Google Home. - Despite all of the above complaints, the device is probably 80-90% of what I realistically need to use it day-to-day. If they throw a better speaker and mic array in, I'd likely be comfortable replacing all of my Google Homes. |
Google Home devices are always buffering. The wake word just tells it to look back in the buffer and start processing.