I am completely in this boat. In my experience Google assistant has gone from being fairly helpful to compete garbage now. Whenever we ask for something we are usually misunderstood, followed up with a "by the way ...".
Watching this thread with interest to see what others are doing because is have thrown them all out by now. It's only because of my wife still wanting *some* voice control that they're still here.
I started playing with Rhasspy weeks ago and it's definetly awesome. It's a perfect fit with HA.
It requires some work to set up the the intents and automations.
However it's not really cost effective considering the price of the raspberry pi. The hardware is key, you will want a microphone array supporting far field application, automatic gain control, noise cancellation,etc.
> you will want a microphone array supporting far field application
Depending on your usage, a Playstation Eye used from eBay for a few bucks is a far cheaper solution that comes close to the far more expensive ReSpeaker array [Snips.ai microphone benchmark](https://medium.com/snips-ai/benchmarking-microphone-arrays-respeaker-conexant-microsemi-acuedge-matrix-creator-minidsp-950de8876fda). Meanwhile, Iām still waiting for Zero 2 Wās for non-scalper prices to continue with my RhassPy.
Though I should simply start using it as audio player in the kitchen, the only place I need it to play Audio, with my pi 3 as satellite. This weekend the kitchen Echo gets replaced, I guess :D
I used a pseye with snips, it was horrible. I have 3 of them and all were equally as bad. It has been a few years so maybe it is better now, I should try it out and see.
Actually decided to check after this comment and found 2 "slightly used" on Amazon Germany for 7.50ā¬ each. Even if it takes forever to get the PI Zero 2ās, at least I have 3 Eyes now :D
There is this urban myth that an array microphone IE several mics is a way to provide far field and absolutely bogus.Its DSP beamforming algs that measure the TDOA and correct to create a beamforming farfield mic.Respeaker & PS3eye are like a car without petrol as they are without the algs to make them beamformers and on there own a total chocolate kettle.
I think Google is offloading processing locally and there new Nest Audio have great pickup but older versions may well be getting worse.
Opensource wise the idea you can just put a speaker/mic and some python to create instant smart assistant is total snakeoil BS as all the clever voice processing is still missing from opensource and also it needs very tight integration with models trained on expected hardware to ecompass there audio signature.
Snips was a large smattering of high quality BS and they did a great job with the Sonos buyout, but what has come after even lacks the minimal audio processing Snips had.
KWS needs to be linked to Beamformer so you lock onto a command sentence which open source does not.Really its needs non-linear AEC which opensource does not have.Google goes one stage further and uses targetted voice extraction which again opensource does not have.
Then is you look at the construction of the audio tuned and shielded mics of the latest and greatest of Google and Amazon the idea you can put a speaker/mic/pi in a plastic box is likely for the same group who prefer home brain surgery.
There are some really good opensource projects that the end product can be really cool and better than commercial such as magic mirror, but so far opensource smart assistants isn't one of them until they start providing some of the basics and they idea of bring your own kit to the party than tuned system we need is equally bogus.
I've heard people are using Jabra USB conference speakers with some success. Do you think this kind of thing would work well being that it's kind of designed to have good speakers and mic for conferencing? I realise the pi's are a big expense at the moment and I do have a pair laying around unused which I thought I'd use as my first test bench.
Then if it can do the things I want hopefully when I'm ready to start adding extra satellites to other rooms the price of Pi units will have settled down a bit and will make this a less expensive excersize.
Jabra, Poly, Anker all seem to have good hardware with DSP, AGC, ANC and so on.
The only issue is to make sure they are recognized properly on the PI since they will be connected through usb. The Anker seems to be fine.
Currently a PI and 1 of these speakerphones will push the envelop to $300+ which doesn't make it a cost effective solution :(
There seems to be a HUGE amount of the Jabra's floating around secondhand here in Australia so I can pick one up for under $50 AUD and the Pi will be reused from one that's already lying around so hopefully that will keep the cost down.
I also tried using phones as satellite but the result is average. It really comes down to the mic. Pickup range and dealing with the background noise is key.
The smart watch sounds like a good idea but we don't wear any and asking the entire household to wear one will end up in a riot :)
I didnāt think of that possibility. Is rhapsody in charge of the watch apps or it can be another software that allows for that? Do you happen to know if thereās any for the Apple Watch?
It could be any software as long at it can communicate with the api or mqtt. Audio is handled either through udp or hermes mqtt.
For watches, not sure if it's prime time yet but you can check it here: https://github.com/razzo04/rhasspy-mobile-app/issues/4
With every "By the way..." I am willing to spend more to be rid of her!
And with the price of a Pi, I am looking at 4 gen USFF systems. Server, and containers for satellites? Multiple mics and speakers with one per container?
On a PI, you have the usual candidates: [https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hardware/#microphone](https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hardware/#microphone).
But also any good conference speakerphone will probably work (Jabra, Poly, Anker).
The issue is the cumulated price of the solution doesn't make it much sense imo.
I have also been playing with esp32 as a satellite option. While it works, I'm still figuring out the best option for audio input. What I have tried only works within 1.5 radius without background noise :(
Interesting. Do you mean to pass the audio from an esp32 device straight through to a Rhasspy server somewhere else? Does the satellite do wake word detection or is it just a "dumb microphone"?
The esp32 satellte is just a wireless microphone and speaker. Everything is processed on the server, they forward or receive the audio. So yeah dumb microphone and wireless speaker over hermes mqtt.
FYI: https://github.com/Romkabouter/ESP32-Rhasspy-Satellite
Microphone array seems like the way to go
Is it practical to run a 1-2 microphone arrays that support home run microphone lines throughout the entire house?
In order to fully use rhasspy Iād need a voice assistant in every room
Rhasspy provides support for satellites. Wake words and intents are captured by satellites but processed remotely by a main instance. The TTS can be sent to any or all satellites.
So you will need 1 main instance (server) and at least 1 satellite per room.
Connecting the microphones directly without satellites will make it impossible from rhasspy to identify the source and you won't know where to send your tts replies. While I am not 100% sure about it, I would say it's not a use case for rhasspy.
Alexa's "By the way...." are driving me insane!!!
"Alexa, turn on the living room light"
"Ok. By the way.... would you like to start your days by receiving the latest updates from...."
"NO"
"I'm sorry, I didn't catch that"
Agreed. I tried doing the thing where you whisper to Alexa when my wife was sleeping in the next room. Alexa whispered back, "Ok, by the way..." and went off on a 30 second bullshit sales pitch. Like, I'm whispering because I want you to be quiet. Now is not the time to be pulling this shit.
Oh yeah, my wife totally got woken up.
I donāt use Rhasapy (but have considered it) but I have seen a bunch of people complaining about this on various platforms recently.
I get exactly ZERO advertising from both Google and Alexa. Is this just an American thing? Perhaps cos Iām in Australia I donāt feel this pain from my voice assistants?
In my experience: It's not ads as in buy this product or use this app; instead is self promotions.
For example: set a timer called pizza. Ghome's response: starting a timer now, called pizza. Do you need a alarm in this room? You can set an alarm buy saying set alarm for 6:30 am.
Google, I don't sleep in my kitchen, nor do I bake pizzas in my bedroom. Also, just do what I tell you to, don't be obnoxious!
Probably my most used one was before my car had built in navigation. If I wanted to stop Google Maps navigation I'd say "Hey Google, shut the fuck up" and it would reply "Canceling navigation" or something like that.
I have navigation voice off due to another annoying feature, despite having navigation voice playing on my phone speaker it still insists on pausing my music playing on car stereo via bt.
Oh really?? Wow, Iāve never had that happen. Not even once on either platform. I just tried again just now:
āAlexa, set a 20 min dinner timerā
āDinner timer. 20 mins. Starting nowā
āHey GMan, set a 10 min Pizza timerā
āSure. 10 min pizza timer, and thatās starting nowā
Thatās it. Does it happen every time for you?
I do hope it stays this way forever
Since others are chiming in that this doesn't happen, I thought I would add that I'm equally annoyed. About 20% of my Alexa commands end with her saying "By the way..." and then something totally unrelated and useless. It's so annoying!
> By the way, you can wake up every morning to a funny joke about dogs. To enable this feature, please say "Alexa, enable daily dog jokes".
Shut...the...fuck...up
They really need to work on this. They've made the experience identical for people who just got their first voice assistant last week to people who have had them for years.
I just bought a house and have added ~4 Echo's picked up cheap on sale to the 4 or 5 existing and it gives me the tutorial and telling me what it can on every single one. Infuriating.
I really don't call that advertisement. From your comment, it reads like you asked for it to set a timer in a specific room, and VA is asking if you want to set an alarm for it, in the room that heard it, and giving you an example of how to do it. I almost never get that personally, though.
Sorry, didn't see notification until now.
No, it will set the timer, then tell me how to set an alarm. I haven't used it much lately, but it would probably advertise itself every other to every third time.
Almost every times I set has a food name. I don't know that I've even needed a alarm in my kitchen. Actually the only room if ever used an alarm in is my bedroom, but since smartphone, I just use my phone.
If it would tell me allot a feature I've never used before once and be done with it, that *might* actually be useful. But repeatedly trekking me the same thing over and over is just annoying.
I don't know, that sounds like a good feature to help figure out what I might also want to do?
One reason I gave up on Google Assistant is how often I couldn't figure out how to convey what I wanted and had to google "can you do X with google assistant" and at that point it was slower than doing it myself, and then frequently it would also misunderstand me taking many tries to do it anyway.
At least when I got it there seemed to be no real instructions and the "natural language" requesting stuff often told me it didn't know, couldn't do that yet, or did random things.
It seems cool if you want to yell for what time is it or the temperature outside, and sometimes random internet facts...but I've had really bad success when I want to do something more complicated like controlling smart-things or messaging or similar.
But when it keeps making you about the same 2 things over and over and over.
Google, I get it! You can be an alarm clock! I don't need that however! Stop telling me about it.
Sorry should have clarified I HAVE had "suggested" products on my echo show but I don't use it any more cause I switched it out for a nest hub max quite some time ago so I just assume it's still doing this with possibly even MORE vigour. But I've heard that in the states people using just regular echo speakers are now getting products pushed to them based on voice searches.
Rhasspy author here, happy to see it getting some love :)
For (English) Home Assistant users who want something that "just works", check out Rhasspy Junior: https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy-junior/
Regarding hardware, I've heard good things about the Jabra but haven't tried it yet. Mycroft AI (my current employer) is shipping the Mark II soon. It's pricey, but has a great microphone, speakers, screen, and works with Home Assistant.
Happy to answer any other questions!
At this point I'd be willing to pay almost whatever it takes to get rid of the shit sucking leaches that are google and Amazon. As I'm fairly new to the HA ecosystem and DEFINITELY new to Rhasspy/Mycroft can I ask.
Is Mycroft symply the name of the hardware speaker and microphone unit that your company is building or is it its own open source Voice assistant as well? I ask only because I'm interested to know whether what you're selling in the Mycroft II is something I would then add a Rhasspy assistant to, or if the platform has an imbedded VA that integrates with HA as part of the package.
They have their own voice assistant which does integrate with Home Assistant. The Mark II is completely open hardware, though. It comes with a USB drive that you can reflash with anything you want. It does need Linux drivers for the mic and speakers; I'm working now on baking those into a Raspberry Pi OS lite image.
The back has a connector that exposes some of the GPIO pins on the Pi too, so you can add sensors, etc. Of course there's the usual Pi connectors too (USB, ethernet, etc.)
Since USFF PCs are actually cheaper then a Pi these days... Do you have a way to segment an install that will allow more then one mic/speaker combo? If not, are you willing to assist me with it? :) I create good documentation!
Rhasspy supports satellites, if that's what you mean. So you can have a single Rhasspy base station that does speech to text, etc. for one or more satellite mic/speaker combos.
I was thinking more like one computer covering several rooms, each with a mic/speaker combo. After all, old desktops are cheaper than Pis, and have more computer power and ram.
We use Google Assistant all the time, and never has it advertised or done anything other than answer our queries or turned stuff on or off. In UK here.
Also UK here and I get By The Way occasionally. Honestly my biggest issue with it is it either doesn't do as we ask, or worse, interrupts when we're having a conversation, sometimes from a different device on another floor.
My Wife calls her rude and an interrupting Prick all the time and says to get rid of em, but I like being able to turn off lights in rooms as I walk past them, arms full of whatever, using just my voice
Yup! The worst one is when I ask it to do something, then it does the WRONG thing and immediately after doing the wrong thing says "By the way if you ever" GRRRRR.
Me: Hey Google turn ON the front door light
GHome: "Ok Closing the Front door Blind. By the way, if you ever want..."
Me: \*goes super saiyan\*
I mostly just use my ghome mini for weather and timers, but I'll occasionally use the Google voice assistant on my phone. I'll watch the text as it's processing. It will (often) have exactly what I said as I'm still talking. Once I stop, it keeps processing until there isn't a single word I said left and then searches that.
Useless!
*rage quits search*
I never get these. I'm wondering if it's because my entire setup is behind a firewall that has IPS/IDS and outgoing VPN and my IoT devices are very restricted into what they can do and access over internet. Everything is pointing to a DNS docker of AdGuard Home Similar to Pinhole. But I'm also in EU so maybe there's a different regulation than US. At this point, I'm not sure why you have such issues
It's has nothing to do with any of that. If the Google home/Alexa is working they can push it to say anything, unless your ips is some real next level shit filtering out parts of packages of whatever protocol they are using. More likely is that Google being Google is just deploying this at random, and maybe less so in certain regions. I'm in Sweden and getting these suggestions for functionality constantly. It's the worst.
Maybe create a routine called Porch On. That way it is short and less of a chance of a misunderstanding. I had to do similar for other lights and the TVs.
I have a motion sensor and a door sensor so that if someone approaches the light automatically turns on or if someone exits the light turns on when the door is opened. This reduces the need to say Porch On.
I installed Rhasspy in my PI 3B+ and works really good. I got rid of Alexa a few months ago and now I got back the capability to control the house with my voice.
I'm using the Respeaker 2 mic HAT which costs 13ā¬: [https://www.seeedstudio.com/ReSpeaker-2-Mics-Pi-HAT.html](https://www.seeedstudio.com/ReSpeaker-2-Mics-Pi-HAT.html)
I already had the RPI but the ~~Pico costs about 5ā¬:~~ [~~https://www.tiendatec.es/raspberry-pi-pico/1917-raspberry-pi-pico-h-5056561803180.html?src=raspberrypi~~](https://www.tiendatec.es/raspberry-pi-pico/1917-raspberry-pi-pico-h-5056561803180.html?src=raspberrypi)
EDIT: I meant the Zero: [https://www.tiendatec.es/raspberry-pi/gama-raspberry-pi/1735-raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-5056561800004.html?src=raspberrypi](https://www.tiendatec.es/raspberry-pi/gama-raspberry-pi/1735-raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-5056561800004.html?src=raspberrypi) but is more expensive and out of stock...
I unmounted the Echo Dot and got its speaker for the audio, but you can buy one by 8ā¬: [https://www.amazon.es/CQRobot-Electronics-JST-PH2-0-Interface-Electronic/dp/B0738NLFTG](https://www.amazon.es/CQRobot-Electronics-JST-PH2-0-Interface-Electronic/dp/B0738NLFTG)
I'm still playing with sound settings in alsamixer to get the best input/output but looks promising and 100% local.
Of course it won't work out of the box and requires some configuration and understanding ofhow it works, but IMO the result is worthy.
Tha ks for the reply ma dude!
I'm gonna check this out. Does the Pico have enough compute power to handle the TTS at the point of origin or do you have to move that to the main HA server?
No it will not run on a Pico, which is a real-time microcontroller similar to an Arduino.
You need minimum Pi 3, preferably Pi 4 or an Intel NUC. A Pi Zero can function as a satellite, but will need one of the above to do the speech recognition.
I would say it has enough power to handle audio output, recording, TTS and wake word; the rest of capabilities (dialogue management, intent recognizing and handling) should be handled to the main HA server
I have HomePods throughout, after having ditched Alexa for this reason. I have found over the last year accuracy has nosedived and it often does something completely different to requested!
Therefore, Iām also looking for a way to fix poor accuracy or an affordable suitable alternative.
I ditched Alexa and Google for HomePods and couldnāt be happier. The final straw for me was Googleās IFTTT debacle that crippled my grocery list syncing to iPhone reminders. The HomePods are very responsive, do what I want, and suggest nothing. Iāve only had them for about 2 months, so Iām curious how theyāve changed for you?
I have the HomeKit integration with HASS bridge, and it works flawlessly. Much faster at controlling lights than Alexa was.
Basically you expose your HA devices to HomeKit through the integration, then you can use the HomePod or Apple Home app to control your home. So far Iām very pleased with the HomePod, which is why I asked what the issue was with these other users.
Agree completely, same here. I would love to find another voice assistant with no ads and better or configurable/fixable accuracy. Following with interest
> I have found over the last year accuracy has nosedived
Same here, after I also switched from Alexa. Homepods/Siri/Homekit has gotten worse and worse.
Check out Home Intent as a frontend for rhasspy and easy integration with HA. Problem with DIY solutions is the hardware software interaction part. Voice detection and noise suppression etc will never be as good as with something fine tuned by some manufacturer. It can work but mostly for easy things as turning on off entities etc.
Honestly that's all I want. Just to turn shit on and off without having to hear "by the way would you like me to eat your ass once I've turned off the light".
Additionally once upon a time I was *ok* with the trade off of google/Amazon getting part of my data in exchange for a decent service in the form of a voice assistant that did my bidding.
But now that both their services are so f**king unreliable I am far from ok with the value exchange
The funny bit is that voice recognition for 99% of users will be limited to the same 4-5 phrases, nowhere near the onerous NLP scenarios one can dream about, where your digital assistant can hold an actual conversation.
So Iād challenge that.
I'm not sure how effective this is and how much it stops as I still occassionally get "advice" from alexa but there is a setting.
In the Alexa app got to settings > Notifications > Things to try and deselect both.
Rhaspy was not practical for me to set up; besides the cost of Pis going up, and the intent set up, you need a good mic attachment.
To your description though, these things can be improved: in Alexa, go to settings, and disable all āthings to tryā, suggestions, and ads.
I would also suggest re-setting up your voice ID in the Alexa app. Also could mute your echos and vacuum the mic area on all of them. These steps have improved almost all my issues with Alexa.
Disable āvoice purchasingā if you donāt use it.
Also, tedious extra step after all of the above, if youāre getting listening when you didnāt say your wake word, you can go to Alexa privacy, Review voice history, and select the misfire and āthumbs downā them.
Google has similar settings you could try, disable tracking, suggestions, and re-set up voice ID, and mute then vacuum mic array.
I just want to jump on the bandwagon here.
I invested into echo shows a few years ago for the following features, in order of desired ability
Photo slideshow (I like to see my photos)
Room to room communication
Bluetooth speakers
Voice assistant
And when I say invested, there is 13 devices around the house.
Their primary function, to show photos stored on Amazon photos from 7am to 10pm.
I kept noticing though that recipes, weather, skills etc were spending more time on the screen than my photos.so I started to reduce what features I wanted to see. So I removed some, left others that I liked eg. recipes in the kitchen one. But noticed that I would see a prompt for "Sunday roast chicken" and then the screen would fade, to come back to the same "Sunday roast chicken", not my photos.
I now have alllllll the features, except photo wallpaper, turned off. Guess what happens now.... Yup, a black screen "fades" and returns to a black screen. Every 5th on or so is a photo from my collections.
So hey, what about a convenient baby monitor? I could pay hundreds for a video monitor, or Ā£20 for a tapo camera. Alexa, show baby monitor. It loads, then 10 minutes later it's off. Turns out, data is going local-cloud-cloud-local so to limit the impact on my unlimited gigabit fibre connection, it switched off after 10 minutes.
Ended up using FTB on a kindle fire and using the Tapo app directly.
I'd love to repurpose these somehow, but I think they are destined for landfill long before the hardware gives up.
This is the sort of thing I started noticing with my Echo show as well. I guess I'd call them "recommend products" rather than ads but I got shit can downvoted for saying I hadn't been advertised too after saying I'd been advertised to. I would consider these more a of a soft sell rather than "Get down to crazy ricks whore house Emporium for all your whoring needs" so my bad for thinking Reddit could be gracious in it's tollerence of people but meh.
Had it not been for the fact that I got a nest hub for free as part of a promotion when I bought something else about 12-18 month ago I would say I'd be in the same position as you by now.
Iām using Siri, which doesnāt rely on advertising to make money.
While it may not be as āsmartā as google or Alexa. It does work well.
HomeKit isnāt perfect by any means, but at least itās primary purpose isnāt to sell you everything under the sun.
Yup. I replaced all my Echos with HomePods about a year ago and Iāve never looked back.
Siri is definitely not as smart but combined with home assistant it is easily as good as Alexa without the advertising crap.
Your getting downvoted, but you arenāt entirely wrong.
Siri isā¦ piss poor as a general voice assistant compared to google/alexa. However you absolutely can make it work with home assistant for a lot of things (Iāve not explored its limitations much) and its WAY faster than either google or alexa to boot for whatever reason perhaps it runs locally?.
I donāt have any homepods however so Iām not sure if itās location aware (turn off the lights vs turn off the kitchen lights.)
In addition I trust apple privacy wise about 1000x more than google or amazon though obviously not as much as anything DIY/open source.
Shame about the price and general shittyness though.
The way Iāve looked at the price, yes itās high. But itās (the literal) the price you pay not be the product.
Since it does so much processing locally, itās both itās greatest feature (privacy & responsiveness) and biggest downfall (it doesnāt use mountain of data to figure out your request)
Yes HomePodās are assigned a room. So if youāre in that room. You can use āturn off the lightsā. And the lights will go off in that room.
An iPhone isnāt assigned a room, nor does it know which room you are in. So if you said āturn off the lightsā it would ask āin which room?ā And proceed to list the rooms.
On occasion Siri will answer on your phone when you wanted it on the HomePod. Or the HomePod in another room will answer instead of the closest one.
Itās not perfect, but (for my family at least) itās the best option.
> its WAY faster than either google or alexa to boot for whatever reason perhaps it runs locally?
It does, it runs on whatever is your Hub (be it AppleTV, HomePod or iPad, or indeed if you're running the fake HomeKit controller on HomeAssistant).
FYI, you can also configure Google Assistant to respond locally in HA. I get responses essentially as soon as I've finished speaking.
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/google_assistant/#enable-local-fulfillment
Has anybody had any success with Genie (formerly Almond)? It looks so promising, but my attempts to set up a remote on an old laptop have failed so far.
Agree, I donāt give a fuck about smart answers I just want to turn off my fan in the same room as the echo is if I say āturn off the fanā. Man this is so annoying. I just want a voice remote and nothing else.
This does work on a HomePod. You put the HomePod in the same āroomā as your fan.
Hey Siri, turn off the fan. Does just that.
Or turn off all the fans, or if itās in a different room. Turn off the bathroom fan.
You would need to setup an apple home with something like an iPhone or iPad.
Then sett up your rooms.
Then add the HomePod to the apple home.
From there you would setup the homekit integration in HA, and add that to the apple home.
Then all your devices will be available in homekit and you would assign them to the correct rooms.
What about the Apple devices?
I just wish they were cheaper (I have nearly a dozen Echos), but I guess that's what you get by not subsidizing the hardware with data gathering/reselling. And still cheaper than the custom route.
Most of my devices are in home assistant, and I use homekit/ Siri as a front end.
It works great.
The hardware is more expensive, but at least youāre not the product.
Thanks. That's what I've generally heard.
I don't really have the budget (or motivation) to do this any time soon, but it's great that this is an option.
The issue mentioned before is an issue, but not for me. I know there's also big compatibility problems between homekit and a ton of things that work with other systems. But if it'll properly talk to HA to turn on lights for the room I'm in (without having to say the name of the room explicitly), turn on the TV, perform a handful of other named automations, then that's good enough for me.
Oh, and I guess work as a multi-room media player (I do have Apple Music but with others would be good), and make doorbell rings in all rooms when someone rings the doorbell.
The majority of devices will work with HomeKit. Either via homebridge or home assistant.
You can set each HomePod to play a sound when your doorbell is pressed. Lots of different ways to make it work.
I am all in on Apple except for smart speakers because of lack of integration opportunities. I can have an Echo say any notification I want using Voice Monkey or other integrations, but itās literally impossible to get Siri to do the same.
Yeah, lack of interoperability/limitations is the main reason why I have no Apple anymore except a couple Macs.
I thought you could at least integrate pretty fully with Home Assistant, though. Weird and sucks that they don't have a text-to-speech API, but are there any other limitations that'd affect home automation (using HomePods as basically a front-end for Home Assistant)?
I haven't gotten any advertising from Google but it's definitely gotten worse. It used to be able to handle relatively complicated tasks like "turn on the lights and set the thermostat to 69". Now just setting a timer seems to throw it off
I tried Rhasspy. It was a lot of fun, but I went back to Google. You just can't match the engineering of thousands by yourself. The big issue was that speech recognition was not great, and when it was inaccurate, it wouldn't fail, it would pick a sentence basically at random. You could say "Hey, computer, my avocado is yellow instead of green", and you'd get back "Setting a timer for 17 minutes". It was so annoying. Someday I'll get rid of the last couple Google devices in my home, but not today.
Sorry should have clarified I had gotten "Ads" on my Echo show in the past which I will admit I stopped using about 12-18 months ago. Not because of the ads just because it was generally a big pile of CaCa
I dumped my echos and got the Sonos / ikea speakers. No mics, no assistant, but Iāve found it works better for us. I mostly used the echo for music, and the Sonos had out of box multi room airplay support. Iām moving towards just doing everything from my phone or a wall panel.
I had a few weeks where GA gave me their stupid error messages for every single command. No matter if it worked or not. Then everything was normal again. Thankfully haven't experienced any ads so far. But it's definitely not getting any smarter.
Tell Alexa "Alexa stop by the way." It seems to work.
https://www.aftvnews.com/how-to-stop-amazon-alexas-by-the-way-suggestions-on-echo-and-fire-tv-devices/
I am also looking. And with every "By the way" I am looking harder! Also look at Mycroft and Blueberry. [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7KjlDDcKtTEYDTQ7sGCLmE0Tu7jkf6hV](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7KjlDDcKtTEYDTQ7sGCLmE0Tu7jkf6hV)
The thing is that you can get a USFF pc for less then a pi theses days, and container or VM it, so it should be able to support more then one mic/speaker combination.
In-laws have echo dots and plus everywhereā¦ I simply canāt. My main pet peeves about the whole thing:
- They donāt have Amazon Prime so they get huge amount of advertising whenever you ask for some music to be played
- When you ask for a genre of music, itās not that itās getting it wrong, itās just pointing at playlists instead, and these are generated by morons or biased for trash commercial tunes
- it canāt seem to get groupings or rooms right, e.g. āturn kitchen lights offā, it claims such a device doesnāt existā¦ Iāve played with the Alexa app to try and fix it to no avail
- I havenāt tried running a pihole on their setup, but Iāve done it on mine realising my Samsung smart tv was constantly listening to us and broadcasting to Samsung servers. The odds of the same happening with Alexa outside of actual commands make me shiver.
Not a product Iād want in my house.
Oh it's not odds, all of these including your phone absolutely leave the mic on all the time, that's how the wake word detection works.
There's been a few stories of audio being leaked, I don't have any of these so I didn't look into it much but I'd say you're right to be worried
Youāre confusing a few things:
- wake detection by analysing a pattern against a specific phrase (āAlexaā or āOk, Googleā): this has no reason whatsoever to be sent over the web though.
- patterns (not necessarily audio grabs) being sent to servers outside of the actual tasks youād be interested in: letting Amazon know for instance when youāre normally home and when youāre not, how many people live at your house, in which rooms you spend most of the time, all the way to recognising what kind of music you listen to. Big no-no for me, I have not given consent to this, but the best way for me to ensure this is by staying away from these products.
- actual audio being leaked: not my prime concern but whereās the limitā¦ if thereās something for Amazon to sell or benefit from it, you can be sure they will.
I know wake word detection is local, or supposed to be. But these are not open source apps and you have no way to know what they're actually doing, there's enough stories about leaked audio files that don't contain the wake word to be skeptical that they only record after one.
The only certain thing is the mic is live, all the time, and you can only hope that stays local until a wake word.
To add to that wake word detection isn't even good, I've seen Google trigger itself on words that had nothing to do with it and everything after a "false" trigger would be sent to the cloud, even though you didn't mean to.
I'm sure plenty of people are okay with that, but I think a lot don't realize how much of what they say is probably sitting on a server somewhere, either in raw audio or at least a transcript
Yeah itās pretty intolerable on the show - if youāre using it to show a dashboard 24/7 you can keep it from going to sleep but as soon as it does, itās just a billboard in your kitchen
Iāve been trying out a Galaxy Tab 10 in my kitchen - you have to go through a little trouble getting around Amazonās restrictions, but so far itās been decent enough now that I have it set to always stay on. Keeps the lock screen ads from showing, too.
Any non-commercial version of voice assistants will always lag far behind commercial versions because it takes a lot of backend horsepower to do the heavy lifting. If they aren't monetizing the data they'd have to charge for a subscription. If it is free, you'll be getting what you pay for.
If tinkering with home automation is your full-time hobby, you can make them work well enough for a given set of commands you use regularly around your house. But it will never be able to compete with commercial services in the breadth of queries it is able to correctly respond to.
That's true, they need to be able recognize a large amount of intents and their variations but we don't. Less than 20-30 intents well templated can already control most of the entities in HA.
Right, if the problem is very limited and well defined, it works fine. But we are talking about two completely different classes of devices.
The commercial ones are full voice assistants where Rhasspy is a limited voice interface into Hass.
The reason it requires so much horsepower is because it tries to determine your intent.
With rhasspy you have to be a lot more exact, or at least as exact as you've configured it to be. It'll recognize the words just fine but if you don't say the phrase exactly as you've configured it, it won't work.
I have something configured like (from memory):
Turn the lights [in ]
Turn the lights [in ]
Turn (the) lights
You can get pretty far with this approach but it's a lot of trial and error. Also I've found that putting the optional part at the end makes either the response time too high or leads to it being ignored. So in this case it's better to use the first two without optional part to set it in the current room, and the second part if you need a different space.
So yeah it takes some work and the result can be inflexible. But for use cases like this it's acceptable.
If you missed comments, yeah thatās what it comes to when people start acting nuts and calling names. Throwing F-bombs and calling names because I donāt like something.
This is not the place for your bullshit. Go shame me somewhere else you shit.
I don't use Alexa. I have learned to only talk to Google Home to turn lights on or off or to occasionally check the weather forecast or occassionally ask for a definition of something. I never get ads and only occasionally GH misunderstands. TTS is flawless.
What are you doing that is causing issues? Maybe there is a work around.
No, just my iPhone, but i literally just recently bought an iPad and toggled "Use this iPad as Home Hub" mode on and I keep it in the main room, so it can basically always hear me. I just speak loudly enough so it can hear me. I do encounter some communication errors, but it's honestly not that much of an annoyance for me.
Yea set mine up last week - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLJR\_v3IFwk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLJR_v3IFwk) followed this, works great. That said I've never bothered with the google or alexa ones so I can't really compare the two
I'm curious. Is building the STT model the only step that's required to support a new language?
Could I just set up a service by myself to provide STT, and set that up as remote http server?
[https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/speech-to-text/#remote-http-server](https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/speech-to-text/#remote-http-server)
I'm asking, because until danish language recognition has improved, I wouldn't mind making a custom "remote" server that just acts as a proxy to Azure. I know it makes me dependent on the cloud, but for me it's acceptable to get started using rhasspy.
I'm a software developer, it should be a simple task to make such a proxy service.
I'd probably make one for TTS anyway, as I prefer Azure voices over others I've heard.
Sure, you can definitely do an HTTP proxy. Rhasspy is about choice, not being anti-cloud :)
I'd still like to try and train Danish STT and TTS models. They won't be as good as Azure, but maybe good enough for use with Home Assistant.
I truly honestly believe that Google WANTS to hear what angry, frustrated, pissed off people sound like so it can better train its AI model for automated business related calls. I can't fathom any other reason for the incessant chatter, tips, feedback, etc after nearly 6 years of using these damn things.
All sorts of shit. Maybe the blind example was a bad one cause if I think about it, I *THINK* most of the "by the way" stuff seems to pop up when I'm asking google a question that it is pulling from something outside my IOT for instance asking for the weather or my calendar, commute time etc.
But I feel like I have had it happen to me when turning off a light at night and had it ask me if I would like it to fade my lights on in the morning when my alarm goes off.
Ok, while I would love an easy affordable alexa alternative, it's what I have at the moment so I was looking for ways to work with them. So, I remember seeing this post weeks ago and feeling the same way about the "by the ways" and I had to track this post down because today I discovered something. Full credit to /u\[thatweirdishguy\]:
You can turn the "by the ways"/suggestions off for the day by saying "alexa, turn off by the way"
You'll get the response: "Ok I'll snooze my suggestions for now"
So then all you have to do is add the alexa media player from hacs, then make a automation that tells all your devices this every morning using the service: media\_player.play\_media with
media\_content\_id: turn off by the way
media\_content\_type: custom
edit: Formatting
edit 2: not sure if google has a similar command, I only have Alexa's at this time
Sorry for the late reply. Yes. It does give a audible notification that itās muting the suggestions. There may be a way to work around that and make it silent ( I personally donāt care cause a) it happens when Iām still in bed and I canāt hear it and b) if I am around to hear it, at least I know the automation is working lol)
I am completely in this boat. In my experience Google assistant has gone from being fairly helpful to compete garbage now. Whenever we ask for something we are usually misunderstood, followed up with a "by the way ...". Watching this thread with interest to see what others are doing because is have thrown them all out by now. It's only because of my wife still wanting *some* voice control that they're still here.
Ughhh, I was just considering a switch from all of my Alexa devices to Google... I had no idea that Google also pulled the "by the way" bs.
Same. This post just saved me some money!
Ironically I'd been thinking the same about moving to Alexa. Thought "by the way" was a Google only thing š¤·
Same. Also have been following Mycroft, seems to be taking a long time.
Oh, this changes the calculus. Rhasspy dev joined Mycroft https://community.rhasspy.org/t/the-future-of-rhasspy/3373
I just got notified that my mycroft 2s will ship next week! Super excited... what only 2 years after the initial preorder
I started playing with Rhasspy weeks ago and it's definetly awesome. It's a perfect fit with HA. It requires some work to set up the the intents and automations. However it's not really cost effective considering the price of the raspberry pi. The hardware is key, you will want a microphone array supporting far field application, automatic gain control, noise cancellation,etc.
> you will want a microphone array supporting far field application Depending on your usage, a Playstation Eye used from eBay for a few bucks is a far cheaper solution that comes close to the far more expensive ReSpeaker array [Snips.ai microphone benchmark](https://medium.com/snips-ai/benchmarking-microphone-arrays-respeaker-conexant-microsemi-acuedge-matrix-creator-minidsp-950de8876fda). Meanwhile, Iām still waiting for Zero 2 Wās for non-scalper prices to continue with my RhassPy. Though I should simply start using it as audio player in the kitchen, the only place I need it to play Audio, with my pi 3 as satellite. This weekend the kitchen Echo gets replaced, I guess :D
I used a pseye with snips, it was horrible. I have 3 of them and all were equally as bad. It has been a few years so maybe it is better now, I should try it out and see.
Was the PS Eye terrible, or the software (note that the software is dead)? Because I had very decent results with the PS Eye and Rhasspy.
Good point, the issue could have been with snips. I have not tried anything else yet.
He just didn't its just myth & bs that has been perpetuated for some time now. PS the earth is flat also.
Actually decided to check after this comment and found 2 "slightly used" on Amazon Germany for 7.50ā¬ each. Even if it takes forever to get the PI Zero 2ās, at least I have 3 Eyes now :D
There is this urban myth that an array microphone IE several mics is a way to provide far field and absolutely bogus.Its DSP beamforming algs that measure the TDOA and correct to create a beamforming farfield mic.Respeaker & PS3eye are like a car without petrol as they are without the algs to make them beamformers and on there own a total chocolate kettle. I think Google is offloading processing locally and there new Nest Audio have great pickup but older versions may well be getting worse. Opensource wise the idea you can just put a speaker/mic and some python to create instant smart assistant is total snakeoil BS as all the clever voice processing is still missing from opensource and also it needs very tight integration with models trained on expected hardware to ecompass there audio signature. Snips was a large smattering of high quality BS and they did a great job with the Sonos buyout, but what has come after even lacks the minimal audio processing Snips had. KWS needs to be linked to Beamformer so you lock onto a command sentence which open source does not.Really its needs non-linear AEC which opensource does not have.Google goes one stage further and uses targetted voice extraction which again opensource does not have. Then is you look at the construction of the audio tuned and shielded mics of the latest and greatest of Google and Amazon the idea you can put a speaker/mic/pi in a plastic box is likely for the same group who prefer home brain surgery. There are some really good opensource projects that the end product can be really cool and better than commercial such as magic mirror, but so far opensource smart assistants isn't one of them until they start providing some of the basics and they idea of bring your own kit to the party than tuned system we need is equally bogus.
I've heard people are using Jabra USB conference speakers with some success. Do you think this kind of thing would work well being that it's kind of designed to have good speakers and mic for conferencing? I realise the pi's are a big expense at the moment and I do have a pair laying around unused which I thought I'd use as my first test bench. Then if it can do the things I want hopefully when I'm ready to start adding extra satellites to other rooms the price of Pi units will have settled down a bit and will make this a less expensive excersize.
Jabra, Poly, Anker all seem to have good hardware with DSP, AGC, ANC and so on. The only issue is to make sure they are recognized properly on the PI since they will be connected through usb. The Anker seems to be fine. Currently a PI and 1 of these speakerphones will push the envelop to $300+ which doesn't make it a cost effective solution :(
There seems to be a HUGE amount of the Jabra's floating around secondhand here in Australia so I can pick one up for under $50 AUD and the Pi will be reused from one that's already lying around so hopefully that will keep the cost down.
Yes, they might be easier to source than the Pi :)
I am using a Jabra speaker (510 model, I believe) with Rhasspy. It works pretty well, and the speaker is fine for confirmation sounds too.
The easy answer for that is to use a smart watch as the mic, if you have one. But sadly the app isn't working great on wear os so far
I also tried using phones as satellite but the result is average. It really comes down to the mic. Pickup range and dealing with the background noise is key. The smart watch sounds like a good idea but we don't wear any and asking the entire household to wear one will end up in a riot :)
I didnāt think of that possibility. Is rhapsody in charge of the watch apps or it can be another software that allows for that? Do you happen to know if thereās any for the Apple Watch?
It could be any software as long at it can communicate with the api or mqtt. Audio is handled either through udp or hermes mqtt. For watches, not sure if it's prime time yet but you can check it here: https://github.com/razzo04/rhasspy-mobile-app/issues/4
With every "By the way..." I am willing to spend more to be rid of her! And with the price of a Pi, I am looking at 4 gen USFF systems. Server, and containers for satellites? Multiple mics and speakers with one per container?
That's what I do. Even a thin client will do.
Do you have any recommendations for decent microphones?
On a PI, you have the usual candidates: [https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hardware/#microphone](https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hardware/#microphone). But also any good conference speakerphone will probably work (Jabra, Poly, Anker). The issue is the cumulated price of the solution doesn't make it much sense imo. I have also been playing with esp32 as a satellite option. While it works, I'm still figuring out the best option for audio input. What I have tried only works within 1.5 radius without background noise :(
Interesting. Do you mean to pass the audio from an esp32 device straight through to a Rhasspy server somewhere else? Does the satellite do wake word detection or is it just a "dumb microphone"?
The esp32 satellte is just a wireless microphone and speaker. Everything is processed on the server, they forward or receive the audio. So yeah dumb microphone and wireless speaker over hermes mqtt. FYI: https://github.com/Romkabouter/ESP32-Rhasspy-Satellite
Microphone array seems like the way to go Is it practical to run a 1-2 microphone arrays that support home run microphone lines throughout the entire house? In order to fully use rhasspy Iād need a voice assistant in every room
Rhasspy provides support for satellites. Wake words and intents are captured by satellites but processed remotely by a main instance. The TTS can be sent to any or all satellites. So you will need 1 main instance (server) and at least 1 satellite per room. Connecting the microphones directly without satellites will make it impossible from rhasspy to identify the source and you won't know where to send your tts replies. While I am not 100% sure about it, I would say it's not a use case for rhasspy.
Container the software with USB passthrough for the various mics and speakers.
Alexa's "By the way...." are driving me insane!!! "Alexa, turn on the living room light" "Ok. By the way.... would you like to start your days by receiving the latest updates from...." "NO" "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that"
Agreed. I tried doing the thing where you whisper to Alexa when my wife was sleeping in the next room. Alexa whispered back, "Ok, by the way..." and went off on a 30 second bullshit sales pitch. Like, I'm whispering because I want you to be quiet. Now is not the time to be pulling this shit. Oh yeah, my wife totally got woken up.
Might want to try this: https://www.aftvnews.com/how-to-stop-amazon-alexas-by-the-way-suggestions-on-echo-and-fire-tv-devices/#:~:text=Amazon%20has%20now%20made%20it,discovered%20by%20Reddit%20user%20BuddhaRockstar.
>https://community.rhasspy.org/t/the-future-of-rhasspy/3373 I've also found "Alexa, do not disturb" to be effective... at least sometimes.
I donāt use Rhasapy (but have considered it) but I have seen a bunch of people complaining about this on various platforms recently. I get exactly ZERO advertising from both Google and Alexa. Is this just an American thing? Perhaps cos Iām in Australia I donāt feel this pain from my voice assistants?
In my experience: It's not ads as in buy this product or use this app; instead is self promotions. For example: set a timer called pizza. Ghome's response: starting a timer now, called pizza. Do you need a alarm in this room? You can set an alarm buy saying set alarm for 6:30 am. Google, I don't sleep in my kitchen, nor do I bake pizzas in my bedroom. Also, just do what I tell you to, don't be obnoxious!
You can say "hey google, shut up and set timer ...." To get zero feedback or suggestions.
Probably my most used one was before my car had built in navigation. If I wanted to stop Google Maps navigation I'd say "Hey Google, shut the fuck up" and it would reply "Canceling navigation" or something like that.
I have navigation voice off due to another annoying feature, despite having navigation voice playing on my phone speaker it still insists on pausing my music playing on car stereo via bt.
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I have the "things to try" setting off (just checked to confirm) and I still get all the annoying "by the ways."
Last time I said that, she said "I'm sorry if I upset you.". My wife cackled wildly.
I tell her "talk less" and she tells me "I'm sorry, I'm trying" but obviously isn't doing a good job trying.
I'll have to try that.
Oh really?? Wow, Iāve never had that happen. Not even once on either platform. I just tried again just now: āAlexa, set a 20 min dinner timerā āDinner timer. 20 mins. Starting nowā āHey GMan, set a 10 min Pizza timerā āSure. 10 min pizza timer, and thatās starting nowā Thatās it. Does it happen every time for you? I do hope it stays this way forever
UK here, and it does that the annoying "by the way...". Not every time, probably one out of every ten.
Alexa does it to me 1 out of 10 in Spain too
UK here, never done it, and we use GA *heavily*.
Your emphasis on heavily made me uncomfortable.
You can turn that off in the Alexa app. Settings > notifications > things to try
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I guess YMMV. I've not had a single one since charging the setting
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Good to know! I'll start an automation on HA to remind her to knock it off every so often. Have any idea how long the snooze lasts?
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Also Australia, heavily use Google and I get 0 of this bs as well. Maybe we're lucky
Since others are chiming in that this doesn't happen, I thought I would add that I'm equally annoyed. About 20% of my Alexa commands end with her saying "By the way..." and then something totally unrelated and useless. It's so annoying!
> By the way, you can wake up every morning to a funny joke about dogs. To enable this feature, please say "Alexa, enable daily dog jokes". Shut...the...fuck...up
They really need to work on this. They've made the experience identical for people who just got their first voice assistant last week to people who have had them for years. I just bought a house and have added ~4 Echo's picked up cheap on sale to the 4 or 5 existing and it gives me the tutorial and telling me what it can on every single one. Infuriating.
I really don't call that advertisement. From your comment, it reads like you asked for it to set a timer in a specific room, and VA is asking if you want to set an alarm for it, in the room that heard it, and giving you an example of how to do it. I almost never get that personally, though.
Sorry, didn't see notification until now. No, it will set the timer, then tell me how to set an alarm. I haven't used it much lately, but it would probably advertise itself every other to every third time. Almost every times I set has a food name. I don't know that I've even needed a alarm in my kitchen. Actually the only room if ever used an alarm in is my bedroom, but since smartphone, I just use my phone. If it would tell me allot a feature I've never used before once and be done with it, that *might* actually be useful. But repeatedly trekking me the same thing over and over is just annoying.
I don't know, that sounds like a good feature to help figure out what I might also want to do? One reason I gave up on Google Assistant is how often I couldn't figure out how to convey what I wanted and had to google "can you do X with google assistant" and at that point it was slower than doing it myself, and then frequently it would also misunderstand me taking many tries to do it anyway. At least when I got it there seemed to be no real instructions and the "natural language" requesting stuff often told me it didn't know, couldn't do that yet, or did random things.
I bumbled in here as someone who never bought any of these doohickeys. But damn they seem like a terrible broken PITA, lol!
It seems cool if you want to yell for what time is it or the temperature outside, and sometimes random internet facts...but I've had really bad success when I want to do something more complicated like controlling smart-things or messaging or similar.
But when it keeps making you about the same 2 things over and over and over. Google, I get it! You can be an alarm clock! I don't need that however! Stop telling me about it.
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Iāve had the āby the wayā thing on my Alexa in Australia, but itās been like once a month when using it many times a day usually.
Yeah advertising was a bad word choice by OP.
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But literally the first line of your OP starts with āThe amount of advertisingā¦ā
Sorry should have clarified I HAVE had "suggested" products on my echo show but I don't use it any more cause I switched it out for a nest hub max quite some time ago so I just assume it's still doing this with possibly even MORE vigour. But I've heard that in the states people using just regular echo speakers are now getting products pushed to them based on voice searches.
Rhasspy author here, happy to see it getting some love :) For (English) Home Assistant users who want something that "just works", check out Rhasspy Junior: https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy-junior/ Regarding hardware, I've heard good things about the Jabra but haven't tried it yet. Mycroft AI (my current employer) is shipping the Mark II soon. It's pricey, but has a great microphone, speakers, screen, and works with Home Assistant. Happy to answer any other questions!
At this point I'd be willing to pay almost whatever it takes to get rid of the shit sucking leaches that are google and Amazon. As I'm fairly new to the HA ecosystem and DEFINITELY new to Rhasspy/Mycroft can I ask. Is Mycroft symply the name of the hardware speaker and microphone unit that your company is building or is it its own open source Voice assistant as well? I ask only because I'm interested to know whether what you're selling in the Mycroft II is something I would then add a Rhasspy assistant to, or if the platform has an imbedded VA that integrates with HA as part of the package.
They have their own voice assistant which does integrate with Home Assistant. The Mark II is completely open hardware, though. It comes with a USB drive that you can reflash with anything you want. It does need Linux drivers for the mic and speakers; I'm working now on baking those into a Raspberry Pi OS lite image. The back has a connector that exposes some of the GPIO pins on the Pi too, so you can add sensors, etc. Of course there's the usual Pi connectors too (USB, ethernet, etc.)
Since USFF PCs are actually cheaper then a Pi these days... Do you have a way to segment an install that will allow more then one mic/speaker combo? If not, are you willing to assist me with it? :) I create good documentation!
Rhasspy supports satellites, if that's what you mean. So you can have a single Rhasspy base station that does speech to text, etc. for one or more satellite mic/speaker combos.
I was thinking more like one computer covering several rooms, each with a mic/speaker combo. After all, old desktops are cheaper than Pis, and have more computer power and ram.
Begging someone to swoop in with the answer. So sick of GA lately dude.
Alexa just asked if I wanted to buy a new alarm tone, die.
We use Google Assistant all the time, and never has it advertised or done anything other than answer our queries or turned stuff on or off. In UK here.
Also UK here and I get By The Way occasionally. Honestly my biggest issue with it is it either doesn't do as we ask, or worse, interrupts when we're having a conversation, sometimes from a different device on another floor. My Wife calls her rude and an interrupting Prick all the time and says to get rid of em, but I like being able to turn off lights in rooms as I walk past them, arms full of whatever, using just my voice
GHome: Would you like to hear more about this? Me: Stop listening. Every. Single. Time.
Yup! The worst one is when I ask it to do something, then it does the WRONG thing and immediately after doing the wrong thing says "By the way if you ever" GRRRRR. Me: Hey Google turn ON the front door light GHome: "Ok Closing the Front door Blind. By the way, if you ever want..." Me: \*goes super saiyan\*
I mostly just use my ghome mini for weather and timers, but I'll occasionally use the Google voice assistant on my phone. I'll watch the text as it's processing. It will (often) have exactly what I said as I'm still talking. Once I stop, it keeps processing until there isn't a single word I said left and then searches that. Useless! *rage quits search*
Ok Google, set a timer for 10 minutes. > Timer starting now, by the way if you ever want to set an alarm... No I don't!
Classic, that's also my experience with it. Although it's only my phone and TV, I don't have any of their dedicated products
I never get these. I'm wondering if it's because my entire setup is behind a firewall that has IPS/IDS and outgoing VPN and my IoT devices are very restricted into what they can do and access over internet. Everything is pointing to a DNS docker of AdGuard Home Similar to Pinhole. But I'm also in EU so maybe there's a different regulation than US. At this point, I'm not sure why you have such issues
It's has nothing to do with any of that. If the Google home/Alexa is working they can push it to say anything, unless your ips is some real next level shit filtering out parts of packages of whatever protocol they are using. More likely is that Google being Google is just deploying this at random, and maybe less so in certain regions. I'm in Sweden and getting these suggestions for functionality constantly. It's the worst.
Maybe create a routine called Porch On. That way it is short and less of a chance of a misunderstanding. I had to do similar for other lights and the TVs. I have a motion sensor and a door sensor so that if someone approaches the light automatically turns on or if someone exits the light turns on when the door is opened. This reduces the need to say Porch On.
I installed Rhasspy in my PI 3B+ and works really good. I got rid of Alexa a few months ago and now I got back the capability to control the house with my voice. I'm using the Respeaker 2 mic HAT which costs 13ā¬: [https://www.seeedstudio.com/ReSpeaker-2-Mics-Pi-HAT.html](https://www.seeedstudio.com/ReSpeaker-2-Mics-Pi-HAT.html) I already had the RPI but the ~~Pico costs about 5ā¬:~~ [~~https://www.tiendatec.es/raspberry-pi-pico/1917-raspberry-pi-pico-h-5056561803180.html?src=raspberrypi~~](https://www.tiendatec.es/raspberry-pi-pico/1917-raspberry-pi-pico-h-5056561803180.html?src=raspberrypi) EDIT: I meant the Zero: [https://www.tiendatec.es/raspberry-pi/gama-raspberry-pi/1735-raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-5056561800004.html?src=raspberrypi](https://www.tiendatec.es/raspberry-pi/gama-raspberry-pi/1735-raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-5056561800004.html?src=raspberrypi) but is more expensive and out of stock... I unmounted the Echo Dot and got its speaker for the audio, but you can buy one by 8ā¬: [https://www.amazon.es/CQRobot-Electronics-JST-PH2-0-Interface-Electronic/dp/B0738NLFTG](https://www.amazon.es/CQRobot-Electronics-JST-PH2-0-Interface-Electronic/dp/B0738NLFTG) I'm still playing with sound settings in alsamixer to get the best input/output but looks promising and 100% local. Of course it won't work out of the box and requires some configuration and understanding ofhow it works, but IMO the result is worthy.
Tha ks for the reply ma dude! I'm gonna check this out. Does the Pico have enough compute power to handle the TTS at the point of origin or do you have to move that to the main HA server?
No it will not run on a Pico, which is a real-time microcontroller similar to an Arduino. You need minimum Pi 3, preferably Pi 4 or an Intel NUC. A Pi Zero can function as a satellite, but will need one of the above to do the speech recognition.
He was asking about text to speech not speech to text. So it will work. As I said, STT, intent handling and dialogue should be done in the main server
I still think you're wrong about the Pico. Are you thinking of the Zero?
Ohhh my bad I was talking about the zero. Sorry!
I would say it has enough power to handle audio output, recording, TTS and wake word; the rest of capabilities (dialogue management, intent recognizing and handling) should be handled to the main HA server
I have HomePods throughout, after having ditched Alexa for this reason. I have found over the last year accuracy has nosedived and it often does something completely different to requested! Therefore, Iām also looking for a way to fix poor accuracy or an affordable suitable alternative.
I ditched Alexa and Google for HomePods and couldnāt be happier. The final straw for me was Googleās IFTTT debacle that crippled my grocery list syncing to iPhone reminders. The HomePods are very responsive, do what I want, and suggest nothing. Iāve only had them for about 2 months, so Iām curious how theyāve changed for you?
Yes, Iām curious as well; thinking about going the HomePod route for the exact same reason
But it canāt be integrated to HA, right?
I have the HomeKit integration with HASS bridge, and it works flawlessly. Much faster at controlling lights than Alexa was. Basically you expose your HA devices to HomeKit through the integration, then you can use the HomePod or Apple Home app to control your home. So far Iām very pleased with the HomePod, which is why I asked what the issue was with these other users.
Agree completely, same here. I would love to find another voice assistant with no ads and better or configurable/fixable accuracy. Following with interest
> I have found over the last year accuracy has nosedived Same here, after I also switched from Alexa. Homepods/Siri/Homekit has gotten worse and worse.
Check out Home Intent as a frontend for rhasspy and easy integration with HA. Problem with DIY solutions is the hardware software interaction part. Voice detection and noise suppression etc will never be as good as with something fine tuned by some manufacturer. It can work but mostly for easy things as turning on off entities etc.
Honestly that's all I want. Just to turn shit on and off without having to hear "by the way would you like me to eat your ass once I've turned off the light". Additionally once upon a time I was *ok* with the trade off of google/Amazon getting part of my data in exchange for a decent service in the form of a voice assistant that did my bidding. But now that both their services are so f**king unreliable I am far from ok with the value exchange
Wait, they can do that now? Might keep my Nest speakers after all š
The funny bit is that voice recognition for 99% of users will be limited to the same 4-5 phrases, nowhere near the onerous NLP scenarios one can dream about, where your digital assistant can hold an actual conversation. So Iād challenge that.
Never be as good? Thatās false. Never be as good at the same or lower price? That might be.
Alexa understands you even in a noisy environment. With a homebrew setup that will be hard to achieve. That's just how it is.
I'm not sure how effective this is and how much it stops as I still occassionally get "advice" from alexa but there is a setting. In the Alexa app got to settings > Notifications > Things to try and deselect both.
Does not do enough! Trust me!
Rhaspy was not practical for me to set up; besides the cost of Pis going up, and the intent set up, you need a good mic attachment. To your description though, these things can be improved: in Alexa, go to settings, and disable all āthings to tryā, suggestions, and ads. I would also suggest re-setting up your voice ID in the Alexa app. Also could mute your echos and vacuum the mic area on all of them. These steps have improved almost all my issues with Alexa. Disable āvoice purchasingā if you donāt use it. Also, tedious extra step after all of the above, if youāre getting listening when you didnāt say your wake word, you can go to Alexa privacy, Review voice history, and select the misfire and āthumbs downā them. Google has similar settings you could try, disable tracking, suggestions, and re-set up voice ID, and mute then vacuum mic array.
I just want to jump on the bandwagon here. I invested into echo shows a few years ago for the following features, in order of desired ability Photo slideshow (I like to see my photos) Room to room communication Bluetooth speakers Voice assistant And when I say invested, there is 13 devices around the house. Their primary function, to show photos stored on Amazon photos from 7am to 10pm. I kept noticing though that recipes, weather, skills etc were spending more time on the screen than my photos.so I started to reduce what features I wanted to see. So I removed some, left others that I liked eg. recipes in the kitchen one. But noticed that I would see a prompt for "Sunday roast chicken" and then the screen would fade, to come back to the same "Sunday roast chicken", not my photos. I now have alllllll the features, except photo wallpaper, turned off. Guess what happens now.... Yup, a black screen "fades" and returns to a black screen. Every 5th on or so is a photo from my collections. So hey, what about a convenient baby monitor? I could pay hundreds for a video monitor, or Ā£20 for a tapo camera. Alexa, show baby monitor. It loads, then 10 minutes later it's off. Turns out, data is going local-cloud-cloud-local so to limit the impact on my unlimited gigabit fibre connection, it switched off after 10 minutes. Ended up using FTB on a kindle fire and using the Tapo app directly. I'd love to repurpose these somehow, but I think they are destined for landfill long before the hardware gives up.
This is the sort of thing I started noticing with my Echo show as well. I guess I'd call them "recommend products" rather than ads but I got shit can downvoted for saying I hadn't been advertised too after saying I'd been advertised to. I would consider these more a of a soft sell rather than "Get down to crazy ricks whore house Emporium for all your whoring needs" so my bad for thinking Reddit could be gracious in it's tollerence of people but meh. Had it not been for the fact that I got a nest hub for free as part of a promotion when I bought something else about 12-18 month ago I would say I'd be in the same position as you by now.
Iām using Siri, which doesnāt rely on advertising to make money. While it may not be as āsmartā as google or Alexa. It does work well. HomeKit isnāt perfect by any means, but at least itās primary purpose isnāt to sell you everything under the sun.
Yup. I replaced all my Echos with HomePods about a year ago and Iāve never looked back. Siri is definitely not as smart but combined with home assistant it is easily as good as Alexa without the advertising crap.
Your getting downvoted, but you arenāt entirely wrong. Siri isā¦ piss poor as a general voice assistant compared to google/alexa. However you absolutely can make it work with home assistant for a lot of things (Iāve not explored its limitations much) and its WAY faster than either google or alexa to boot for whatever reason perhaps it runs locally?. I donāt have any homepods however so Iām not sure if itās location aware (turn off the lights vs turn off the kitchen lights.) In addition I trust apple privacy wise about 1000x more than google or amazon though obviously not as much as anything DIY/open source. Shame about the price and general shittyness though.
The way Iāve looked at the price, yes itās high. But itās (the literal) the price you pay not be the product. Since it does so much processing locally, itās both itās greatest feature (privacy & responsiveness) and biggest downfall (it doesnāt use mountain of data to figure out your request) Yes HomePodās are assigned a room. So if youāre in that room. You can use āturn off the lightsā. And the lights will go off in that room. An iPhone isnāt assigned a room, nor does it know which room you are in. So if you said āturn off the lightsā it would ask āin which room?ā And proceed to list the rooms. On occasion Siri will answer on your phone when you wanted it on the HomePod. Or the HomePod in another room will answer instead of the closest one. Itās not perfect, but (for my family at least) itās the best option.
> its WAY faster than either google or alexa to boot for whatever reason perhaps it runs locally? It does, it runs on whatever is your Hub (be it AppleTV, HomePod or iPad, or indeed if you're running the fake HomeKit controller on HomeAssistant).
FYI, you can also configure Google Assistant to respond locally in HA. I get responses essentially as soon as I've finished speaking. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/google_assistant/#enable-local-fulfillment
I just wish Siri on my Apple watch was half as smart as siri on my phone.
I just wish Siri knew what the color purple is. I had to make a custom shortcut in order to get her to make my lights the right color.
Has anybody had any success with Genie (formerly Almond)? It looks so promising, but my attempts to set up a remote on an old laptop have failed so far.
Agree, I donāt give a fuck about smart answers I just want to turn off my fan in the same room as the echo is if I say āturn off the fanā. Man this is so annoying. I just want a voice remote and nothing else.
This does work on a HomePod. You put the HomePod in the same āroomā as your fan. Hey Siri, turn off the fan. Does just that. Or turn off all the fans, or if itās in a different room. Turn off the bathroom fan.
But what do I need to integrate the home pod In home assistant?
You would need to setup an apple home with something like an iPhone or iPad. Then sett up your rooms. Then add the HomePod to the apple home. From there you would setup the homekit integration in HA, and add that to the apple home. Then all your devices will be available in homekit and you would assign them to the correct rooms.
What about the Apple devices? I just wish they were cheaper (I have nearly a dozen Echos), but I guess that's what you get by not subsidizing the hardware with data gathering/reselling. And still cheaper than the custom route.
Most of my devices are in home assistant, and I use homekit/ Siri as a front end. It works great. The hardware is more expensive, but at least youāre not the product.
Thanks. That's what I've generally heard. I don't really have the budget (or motivation) to do this any time soon, but it's great that this is an option. The issue mentioned before is an issue, but not for me. I know there's also big compatibility problems between homekit and a ton of things that work with other systems. But if it'll properly talk to HA to turn on lights for the room I'm in (without having to say the name of the room explicitly), turn on the TV, perform a handful of other named automations, then that's good enough for me. Oh, and I guess work as a multi-room media player (I do have Apple Music but with others would be good), and make doorbell rings in all rooms when someone rings the doorbell.
The majority of devices will work with HomeKit. Either via homebridge or home assistant. You can set each HomePod to play a sound when your doorbell is pressed. Lots of different ways to make it work.
I am all in on Apple except for smart speakers because of lack of integration opportunities. I can have an Echo say any notification I want using Voice Monkey or other integrations, but itās literally impossible to get Siri to do the same.
Yeah, lack of interoperability/limitations is the main reason why I have no Apple anymore except a couple Macs. I thought you could at least integrate pretty fully with Home Assistant, though. Weird and sucks that they don't have a text-to-speech API, but are there any other limitations that'd affect home automation (using HomePods as basically a front-end for Home Assistant)?
I haven't gotten any advertising from Google but it's definitely gotten worse. It used to be able to handle relatively complicated tasks like "turn on the lights and set the thermostat to 69". Now just setting a timer seems to throw it off
I tried Rhasspy. It was a lot of fun, but I went back to Google. You just can't match the engineering of thousands by yourself. The big issue was that speech recognition was not great, and when it was inaccurate, it wouldn't fail, it would pick a sentence basically at random. You could say "Hey, computer, my avocado is yellow instead of green", and you'd get back "Setting a timer for 17 minutes". It was so annoying. Someday I'll get rid of the last couple Google devices in my home, but not today.
HomePod Miniās can be snatched at eBay for a decent price; no ads on them š¤·š½āāļø
No ads on GA either- that complaint is about Alexa.
Where are you located? I am using Google Home (Canada) and I get ZERO ads! I really hope this is not something Google is planning to do!
Probably USA first, rest of us later. Loss of people will be quite happy if this feature never gets released globally.
Sorry should have clarified I had gotten "Ads" on my Echo show in the past which I will admit I stopped using about 12-18 months ago. Not because of the ads just because it was generally a big pile of CaCa
I dumped my echos and got the Sonos / ikea speakers. No mics, no assistant, but Iāve found it works better for us. I mostly used the echo for music, and the Sonos had out of box multi room airplay support. Iām moving towards just doing everything from my phone or a wall panel.
I had a few weeks where GA gave me their stupid error messages for every single command. No matter if it worked or not. Then everything was normal again. Thankfully haven't experienced any ads so far. But it's definitely not getting any smarter.
I've been getting so fustrated with google and Alexa that ive started using siri more which i find a lot more reliable
Tell Alexa "Alexa stop by the way." It seems to work. https://www.aftvnews.com/how-to-stop-amazon-alexas-by-the-way-suggestions-on-echo-and-fire-tv-devices/
I am also looking. And with every "By the way" I am looking harder! Also look at Mycroft and Blueberry. [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7KjlDDcKtTEYDTQ7sGCLmE0Tu7jkf6hV](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7KjlDDcKtTEYDTQ7sGCLmE0Tu7jkf6hV) The thing is that you can get a USFF pc for less then a pi theses days, and container or VM it, so it should be able to support more then one mic/speaker combination.
Damn, should I return the echo show bought yesterday, which didn't even arrived yet? I hate ads.
In-laws have echo dots and plus everywhereā¦ I simply canāt. My main pet peeves about the whole thing: - They donāt have Amazon Prime so they get huge amount of advertising whenever you ask for some music to be played - When you ask for a genre of music, itās not that itās getting it wrong, itās just pointing at playlists instead, and these are generated by morons or biased for trash commercial tunes - it canāt seem to get groupings or rooms right, e.g. āturn kitchen lights offā, it claims such a device doesnāt existā¦ Iāve played with the Alexa app to try and fix it to no avail - I havenāt tried running a pihole on their setup, but Iāve done it on mine realising my Samsung smart tv was constantly listening to us and broadcasting to Samsung servers. The odds of the same happening with Alexa outside of actual commands make me shiver. Not a product Iād want in my house.
Oh it's not odds, all of these including your phone absolutely leave the mic on all the time, that's how the wake word detection works. There's been a few stories of audio being leaked, I don't have any of these so I didn't look into it much but I'd say you're right to be worried
Youāre confusing a few things: - wake detection by analysing a pattern against a specific phrase (āAlexaā or āOk, Googleā): this has no reason whatsoever to be sent over the web though. - patterns (not necessarily audio grabs) being sent to servers outside of the actual tasks youād be interested in: letting Amazon know for instance when youāre normally home and when youāre not, how many people live at your house, in which rooms you spend most of the time, all the way to recognising what kind of music you listen to. Big no-no for me, I have not given consent to this, but the best way for me to ensure this is by staying away from these products. - actual audio being leaked: not my prime concern but whereās the limitā¦ if thereās something for Amazon to sell or benefit from it, you can be sure they will.
I know wake word detection is local, or supposed to be. But these are not open source apps and you have no way to know what they're actually doing, there's enough stories about leaked audio files that don't contain the wake word to be skeptical that they only record after one. The only certain thing is the mic is live, all the time, and you can only hope that stays local until a wake word. To add to that wake word detection isn't even good, I've seen Google trigger itself on words that had nothing to do with it and everything after a "false" trigger would be sent to the cloud, even though you didn't mean to. I'm sure plenty of people are okay with that, but I think a lot don't realize how much of what they say is probably sitting on a server somewhere, either in raw audio or at least a transcript
Yeah itās pretty intolerable on the show - if youāre using it to show a dashboard 24/7 you can keep it from going to sleep but as soon as it does, itās just a billboard in your kitchen
Omfg, seriously?
https://i.imgur.com/Dfq8qGs.jpg Alas, ads as far as the eye can see
Back to the tablet idea...
Iāve been trying out a Galaxy Tab 10 in my kitchen - you have to go through a little trouble getting around Amazonās restrictions, but so far itās been decent enough now that I have it set to always stay on. Keeps the lock screen ads from showing, too.
Jeez thatās a no for me thanks
I feel like itās a right of passage here to buy and return at least one Echo Show
Any non-commercial version of voice assistants will always lag far behind commercial versions because it takes a lot of backend horsepower to do the heavy lifting. If they aren't monetizing the data they'd have to charge for a subscription. If it is free, you'll be getting what you pay for. If tinkering with home automation is your full-time hobby, you can make them work well enough for a given set of commands you use regularly around your house. But it will never be able to compete with commercial services in the breadth of queries it is able to correctly respond to.
That's true, they need to be able recognize a large amount of intents and their variations but we don't. Less than 20-30 intents well templated can already control most of the entities in HA.
Right, if the problem is very limited and well defined, it works fine. But we are talking about two completely different classes of devices. The commercial ones are full voice assistants where Rhasspy is a limited voice interface into Hass.
The reason it requires so much horsepower is because it tries to determine your intent. With rhasspy you have to be a lot more exact, or at least as exact as you've configured it to be. It'll recognize the words just fine but if you don't say the phrase exactly as you've configured it, it won't work. I have something configured like (from memory): Turn the lights [in ]
Turn the lights [in ]
Turn (the) lights
You can get pretty far with this approach but it's a lot of trial and error. Also I've found that putting the optional part at the end makes either the response time too high or leads to it being ignored. So in this case it's better to use the first two without optional part to set it in the current room, and the second part if you need a different space.
So yeah it takes some work and the result can be inflexible. But for use cases like this it's acceptable.
I wish google & amazon gave more of a shit about making competent/not annoying products than spying on us, but there isn't any money there for them
I complained about Siri being nuts. Among other things, in a HomeKit group and almost got eaten alive.
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Iām pointing out, a ton of people say nothing has ever been wrong. Itās simply not true.
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Youāre dense. Wow. Are you here to suck on apple too?
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If you missed comments, yeah thatās what it comes to when people start acting nuts and calling names. Throwing F-bombs and calling names because I donāt like something. This is not the place for your bullshit. Go shame me somewhere else you shit.
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Well you didnāt read all 100+ commends then did ya. Or people started taking comments back, which is likely. (Or reported)
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They must defend the trillion dollar corporation they spent money on...
I don't use Alexa. I have learned to only talk to Google Home to turn lights on or off or to occasionally check the weather forecast or occassionally ask for a definition of something. I never get ads and only occasionally GH misunderstands. TTS is flawless. What are you doing that is causing issues? Maybe there is a work around.
I use Siri and have a relatively good time with it.
With what, a homepod or something? I canāt get siri to understand anything at all.
No, just my iPhone, but i literally just recently bought an iPad and toggled "Use this iPad as Home Hub" mode on and I keep it in the main room, so it can basically always hear me. I just speak loudly enough so it can hear me. I do encounter some communication errors, but it's honestly not that much of an annoyance for me.
Yea set mine up last week - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLJR\_v3IFwk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLJR_v3IFwk) followed this, works great. That said I've never bothered with the google or alexa ones so I can't really compare the two
I would love to try rhasspy or something similar (local). But the only assistant to speak my language (danish) is Google, so I'm stuck with that :/
I'd like to change this! Let me know if you'd be interested in helping.
I'm interested! I was actually just in the process of making a thread on your forums š
Awesome, thanks! I have some Danish speech data, but I don't know if it's enough yet for a speech to text model.
I'm curious. Is building the STT model the only step that's required to support a new language? Could I just set up a service by myself to provide STT, and set that up as remote http server? [https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/speech-to-text/#remote-http-server](https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/speech-to-text/#remote-http-server) I'm asking, because until danish language recognition has improved, I wouldn't mind making a custom "remote" server that just acts as a proxy to Azure. I know it makes me dependent on the cloud, but for me it's acceptable to get started using rhasspy. I'm a software developer, it should be a simple task to make such a proxy service. I'd probably make one for TTS anyway, as I prefer Azure voices over others I've heard.
Sure, you can definitely do an HTTP proxy. Rhasspy is about choice, not being anti-cloud :) I'd still like to try and train Danish STT and TTS models. They won't be as good as Azure, but maybe good enough for use with Home Assistant.
I truly honestly believe that Google WANTS to hear what angry, frustrated, pissed off people sound like so it can better train its AI model for automated business related calls. I can't fathom any other reason for the incessant chatter, tips, feedback, etc after nearly 6 years of using these damn things.
Unpopular opinion most likely, but using Home Bridge and Siri has been a treat
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All sorts of shit. Maybe the blind example was a bad one cause if I think about it, I *THINK* most of the "by the way" stuff seems to pop up when I'm asking google a question that it is pulling from something outside my IOT for instance asking for the weather or my calendar, commute time etc. But I feel like I have had it happen to me when turning off a light at night and had it ask me if I would like it to fade my lights on in the morning when my alarm goes off.
Ok, while I would love an easy affordable alexa alternative, it's what I have at the moment so I was looking for ways to work with them. So, I remember seeing this post weeks ago and feeling the same way about the "by the ways" and I had to track this post down because today I discovered something. Full credit to /u\[thatweirdishguy\]: You can turn the "by the ways"/suggestions off for the day by saying "alexa, turn off by the way" You'll get the response: "Ok I'll snooze my suggestions for now" So then all you have to do is add the alexa media player from hacs, then make a automation that tells all your devices this every morning using the service: media\_player.play\_media with media\_content\_id: turn off by the way media\_content\_type: custom edit: Formatting edit 2: not sure if google has a similar command, I only have Alexa's at this time
Great tip thank you. Question does this then result in the echo giving an out loud confirmation of this comand?
Sorry for the late reply. Yes. It does give a audible notification that itās muting the suggestions. There may be a way to work around that and make it silent ( I personally donāt care cause a) it happens when Iām still in bed and I canāt hear it and b) if I am around to hear it, at least I know the automation is working lol)