Is it easy to set up a smart speaker with Home Assistant? Last I heard, it was kind of a PITA.

I'm curious about this as well. I think all the components are available, but nobody's clicked them together yet.

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 am shocked…shocked! that Google would let a product die on the vine and cease supporting it. Google assistant is dead, long live Gemini assistant!

Its about generating investor buzzwords and killing off beloved apps every 3-6 months.

My understanding is the software is the problem, I don't understand why though.

Depends on which one you have. If you buy their own smart speaker (Voice PE), which is designed to stay entirely local if you have the right hardware and software locally, and even has a hardware switch to temporarily disable the microphone, it's pretty easy. And of you don't have all that locally you need a paid subscription to use their cloud a little bit, but they won't store anything. So still pretty easy.

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.

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.

You can. There are simple options, that only recognise predefined sentences, that even work on a Raspberry Pi, and at the other end of the spectrum you can host an LLM locally and chat with that if you have the right hardware (Coral isn't powerful enough for that, you want a GPU with lots of VRAM). Obviously setting this up is more complicated, but there are a lot of options to do it your way.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Does it work with music assistant in HA? Thanks for the response btw

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.

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.