DIY Voice Assistant

💬 Lounge
#1

I know this has been asked in the past, but I'm curious if any progress has been made in the open source world on this. It's certainly becoming necessary.

I've primarily used Alexa as my voice assistant of choice, but she's gotten less and less reliable lately, and also somewhat uh...mouthy? I'm really tired of getting follow ups to routine commands like "Would you like me to use the x skill with this to play music for you in the future". It's getting annoying and pushy.

When it comes down to it, I really only use Alexa for:

  1. Timers
  2. Alarms
  3. As a trigger for commands to control devices.

A far distant, and likely harder to replace, 4th item would be for integration with news and music services. Something that could tap into a local music collection, audio book collection, and maybe even RSS-supported news blogs, would be the overall dream replacement.

Anyway, has anyone seen any progress towards such a setup?

#2

Rhasspy or Mycroft?

2 Likes
#3

Checked into both of these. Sadly, very command-lined based. It seems fairly plug and play if you install on a Raspberry Pi, but...wow, so many of these "write to an SD card and put it in a RP" projects that seem promising, but if I pursued them all, I'd need one of those Bramble cases. Why aren't these things easy to just spin up on a more powerful, full fledged desktop? I digress though...

Looking at Rhasspy on a RP right now. Liked the look of Mycroft, but did some digging only to find it's dependent on a backend they own. It sounds like it could be just as much a headache as Alexa or Google Assistant, and then there's always the possibility they get acquired. Ugh...

Short answer: There still is no real alternative sadly.

Download the Hubitat app