For those of you who aren’t as familiar with Home Assistant, it’s an open-source smart home platform that, well, assists in running and managing a home. Now, Home Assistant is getting its own voice assistant, as posted by its founder, Paulus Schoutsen, in a blog last week. This new push could localize all voice commands that control smart devices – without needing to connect with assistants like Alexa, Google, and Siri. The voice assistant is slated to be available sometime in 2023.

Solo Home Assistant

Schoutsen also runs the company Nabu Casa, which provides first-party cloud services to Home Assistant and contributes to the development of its free platform. To add, Nabu Casa makes use of the Yellow out-of-box hardware solution that can run Home Assistant in your residence without the need to manually build one on a computer or Raspberry Pi.

To build a voice assistant for Home Assistant, Nabu Casa needed someone with experience, leading it to bring in developer Michael Hansen as project lead. Hansen created another open-source app, Rhasspy, which is a community-backed voice assistant, making him the best candidate to spearhead this new push. One of Nabu Casa’s main priorities for the new voice assistant is to give it support for multiple languages. At present, its UI already supports up to 62 languages, which Schoutsen hopes the community can help to get them all voice-ready. 

Of course, the Home Assistant voice product will function differently from, say, a smart speaker. While it’ll have ‘Smart’ integrations, it won’t be along the same lines as how Alexa, Google, and Siri work. The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison-Tuohoy notes that even the easiest and fastest of present-day voice assistants (Siri) still requires an internet connection to work, whereas this new solution is said to be completely local. While Apple might have the operational advantage thanks to its ‘Apple Home Kit’, incoming Matter support looks to help close any operational gaps that might appear. With Matter support, Home Assistant, in the future, could use its own voice assistant to control the devices that it has brought together. The platform is said to already have conversation integration that understands text-based speech, and Schoutsen mentions that command sentences are now being gathered in a new ‘intents repository’ that’ll help the community program their own actions. 

The Wrap

While it doesn’t say much directly about how this can fit in with Social Media, the opportunities found in situations that would involve smart home management can be used as catalysts to bolster your content, allowing you to work on improving engagement and brand awareness. What’s more, the voice assistant of big companies tends to be costly in terms of both maintenance and operation.

So, while it might not be an obvious benefit, just think of scenarios that would benefit your approach by featuring something as innovative as a cloudless, smart home assistant. It’s an interesting innovation and something that’s well worth observing come 2023.

Sources 

https://bit.ly/3C5txkG