The platform open-source Home Assistant will have its own voice assistant, without having to connect to Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant. This new convenience will arrive in 2023.
Home Assistant will have its own voice assistant
Paul Schouten, founder of the project, announced the voice assistant in a blog post. Schoutsen also manages nabu housecompanies that provides cloud services to Home Assistant and contributes to the development, also produces Yellow, the hardware solution to use Home Assistant at home. Although open-source, you can install the software on any smart home platform, including a Raspberry Pi.
To develop voice assistants, Nabu Casa took over Michael Hansenwhich developed the open-source and community-built voice assistant Rhasspy. The main goal is to support up to 62 different languages, all those where you can use Home Assistant.
Schoutsen explains that to keep the programming job manageable, they’ll focus on the basics at first. So smart home management, no web searches, calls or voice games.
Home Assistant has also recently announced support for the Matter standard, like many other realities in the smart home world. So you can control more and more devices with this open-source solution. The platform also has already integrated text-based conversational software, so that you can communicate using the keyboard in a natural way. Little by little, you will also be able to do it by voice.
Competing with giants like Google, Amazon and Apple will not be easy for the Home Assistant. But for those looking for an alternative solution, the possibility of a open source product may be attractive, if the usage was simple. The voice assistant would be an important step in this direction.