Home Assistant Voice
home-assistant.ioVery excited about this.
It represents the culmination of ~2 years of development by the Home Assistant team. They announced 2023 as the "Year of Voice" back in December 2022 [1] and during 2023 they made a lot of leaps forwards in the software, but there has been a lack of off-the-shelf hardware options.
Insta-buy for me!
[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2022/12/20/year-of-voice/
Relatively modest hardware requirement: Intel N100 or equivalent for Whisper Base (for large public dataset languages).
I upgraded my Home Assistant Yellow from a CM4 to a CM5[1], and latency for voice commands was great, going from about 3-4 seconds to 1-2 seconds. Completely local, still.
[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/home-assistant-yellow...
Oh hey Jeff! They should probably include your real-world experience in the FAQ :D So a CM5/RPi5 at approximately half the score of N100 is usable?[0] Can't wait for the next stage.. a pre-fab HA-Voice/CM5 hybrid device (or perhaps more likely a Banana/Orange/Odroid variant).
Shame they're vague on the Whisper’s Small or Large models that require significantly more powerful hardware part (even if it's just preview edition)
[0]: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/04/29/raspberry-pi-5-intel...
The trouble is real world applications (like combining Whisper + piper + HA, etc.) differs from specific benchmarks (many of which target different parts of the Linux stack that may be more optimized for arm or x86 specific features...).
And that doesn't account for individual N100 device variation—some have different power and thermal capacity (e.g. the Radxa X4 is limited compared to a larger mini PC).