Google Assistant Is Basically on Life Support and Things Just Got Worse
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I Still get their apps confused because of the stupid icon updates....or maybe I stupid and can't learn new things.
Their new icons are so dumb. I think they thought people would get used to them but no, they’re still bad after several years.
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Is it easy to set up a smart speaker with Home Assistant? Last I heard, it was kind of a PITA.
Buy this. You can use your own voice processing on another machine on your network. You could even hook it up to your Ollama. I have it and it's completely replaced Google Home for voice control.
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I want to run my own voice processing service, ideally. Something that runs off of my home assistant server, would be cool if it made use of a Coral AI or similar.
IIRC it's supposed to be getting better rapidly, as it's an active focus of development for Home Assistant.
That said, I thought this seemed like a good guide on how to set it up as of 8 months ago. (I'm not necessarily a fan of that guy's bombastic over-enthusiasm, but the info seems good.)
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Buy this. You can use your own voice processing on another machine on your network. You could even hook it up to your Ollama. I have it and it's completely replaced Google Home for voice control.
How is the speaker in that? I have some atoms and the speaker sucks. Thinking about buying a bunch of these Google devices and replacing the PCB but I'd rather save the time if something like this actually has good sound.
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How is the speaker in that? I have some atoms and the speaker sucks. Thinking about buying a bunch of these Google devices and replacing the PCB but I'd rather save the time if something like this actually has good sound.
For music, it's not great. For voice, it's pretty good. It's decently loud and legible. There's no bass. The mics however are pretty good. As far as I've read, you can't get the mics to work well unless they're tuned for that speaker in physical placement and hardware/firmware. The HA speaker uses the same kind of DSP chip that makes it possible for it to hear well in worse than ideal conditions which makes speech recognition work so well. So yeah, if you don't wanna faff with stuff and you don't care about music, just get it. It's got 3.5mm TRS out if you wanna hook a proper speaker for music. The DAC is probably not amazing for HiFi but should you want to hook up something like a JBL Charge, I imagine it should work. In fact I'm planning to do this in another room where I used to use a larger Google Nest speaker for music.
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For music, it's not great. For voice, it's pretty good. It's decently loud and legible. There's no bass. The mics however are pretty good. As far as I've read, you can't get the mics to work well unless they're tuned for that speaker in physical placement and hardware/firmware. The HA speaker uses the same kind of DSP chip that makes it possible for it to hear well in worse than ideal conditions which makes speech recognition work so well. So yeah, if you don't wanna faff with stuff and you don't care about music, just get it. It's got 3.5mm TRS out if you wanna hook a proper speaker for music. The DAC is probably not amazing for HiFi but should you want to hook up something like a JBL Charge, I imagine it should work. In fact I'm planning to do this in another room where I used to use a larger Google Nest speaker for music.
Does it work with music assistant in HA? Thanks for the response btw
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I don't use Google assistant to control any other devices but the amount of stuff I ask 'hey Google's to do over the last few years has gotten worse than when it first started. More often now I just play music to it via Bluetooth connection.
It's also how randomly terrible it will be. There are days it couldn't set timers only to work the next day. Or worse telling it stop timer would stop what was playing on a completely different device.
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I assume this is going to arrive at the solution of "Upgrade to Gemini-supported devices today!" Yeah, no thanks.
I wish I could get Home Assistant working with my nest minis.Get an ESP32, a temperature sensor, and 4x relay board and build your own with esphome!
If you pull the instructions for your thermostat, the wiring guide should tell you what each wire is for (because you can't trust wire colors). From there it's just wiring up the relays properly, getting the config built in esphome, and setting up a generic thermostat.
It sounds kinda daunting, but it's really not super complex. The only gotchas too look out for are any of the relays that can't be on when another relay is on. There's a way to prevent that in esphome. I'm sure someone has made a guide on it by now. I would have made one if I had gotten my enclosure figured out before my 3D printer took a hiatus.
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You got to love the author of that article. If you want the lights to turn off and on normally, maybe people should use light switches. Those aren't going to break due to software downgrades, those don't require Gemini or internet connections.
And I understand, there are rare situations when throwing the internet at your home appliances can make sense for solving niche problems. Those situations definitely exist, but for almost everyone almost all of the time, but it's pretty fucking easy to turn lights off and on.
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You got to love the author of that article. If you want the lights to turn off and on normally, maybe people should use light switches. Those aren't going to break due to software downgrades, those don't require Gemini or internet connections.
And I understand, there are rare situations when throwing the internet at your home appliances can make sense for solving niche problems. Those situations definitely exist, but for almost everyone almost all of the time, but it's pretty fucking easy to turn lights off and on.
I just leave everything on all the time.
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Is it easy to set up a smart speaker with Home Assistant? Last I heard, it was kind of a PITA.
Probably 200$ of raspberry pi gear plus a few weekends messing around should net you something awesome that only catastrophically fails sometimes.
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Does it work with music assistant in HA? Thanks for the response btw
Not sure what a music assistant is. The speaker acts like a media player in Home Assistant. Actually now that I think about it, I don't know how I'd play music on it. It doesn't seem to do cast. 🤭
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You got to love the author of that article. If you want the lights to turn off and on normally, maybe people should use light switches. Those aren't going to break due to software downgrades, those don't require Gemini or internet connections.
And I understand, there are rare situations when throwing the internet at your home appliances can make sense for solving niche problems. Those situations definitely exist, but for almost everyone almost all of the time, but it's pretty fucking easy to turn lights off and on.
Lights are one of the areas where I think automation is genuinely useful, but my rule with anything "Smart" is that it has to be able to run 100% locally.
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Probably 200$ of raspberry pi gear plus a few weekends messing around should net you something awesome that only catastrophically fails sometimes.
XD, I totally did this to make a smart alarm clock a couple years ago. That said it is completely stable, don't think it has ever crashed or locked up on me, unlike the echo show it replaced that did so frequently (not to mention it occasionally updating in the middle of the night and waking me up at full brightness)
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You got to love the author of that article. If you want the lights to turn off and on normally, maybe people should use light switches. Those aren't going to break due to software downgrades, those don't require Gemini or internet connections.
And I understand, there are rare situations when throwing the internet at your home appliances can make sense for solving niche problems. Those situations definitely exist, but for almost everyone almost all of the time, but it's pretty fucking easy to turn lights off and on.
These just dont need to be online. 90% of the use I have seen is timers and lights, like a half step above hello world.
There is a market for voice assistants that are local.
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These just dont need to be online. 90% of the use I have seen is timers and lights, like a half step above hello world.
There is a market for voice assistants that are local.
Home assistant is capable of it. Unfortunately it's not yet overly user friendly about it, but it's getting better rapidly.
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Lights are one of the areas where I think automation is genuinely useful, but my rule with anything "Smart" is that it has to be able to run 100% locally.
It also needs to fail gracefully. A smart switch needs to fail to a dumb switch, not "no switch".
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Get an ESP32, a temperature sensor, and 4x relay board and build your own with esphome!
If you pull the instructions for your thermostat, the wiring guide should tell you what each wire is for (because you can't trust wire colors). From there it's just wiring up the relays properly, getting the config built in esphome, and setting up a generic thermostat.
It sounds kinda daunting, but it's really not super complex. The only gotchas too look out for are any of the relays that can't be on when another relay is on. There's a way to prevent that in esphome. I'm sure someone has made a guide on it by now. I would have made one if I had gotten my enclosure figured out before my 3D printer took a hiatus.
The Google Nest Mini is a smart speaker, not the smart thermostat with a similar name.
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It also needs to fail gracefully. A smart switch needs to fail to a dumb switch, not "no switch".
You're absolutely correct. I have few smart switches around the house and automations for yard lights and stuff like that are pretty nice to have but I still have the physical switch where the dumb switch was to interact with if the automations are down or I just want to override them. The ones I use even accept the same faceplate than traditional ones so there's no change on anything unless you want to automate things.
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I assume this is going to arrive at the solution of "Upgrade to Gemini-supported devices today!" Yeah, no thanks.
I wish I could get Home Assistant working with my nest minis.I have it set up fine?
