Technology

Funny...I'm the exact opposite. I don't want it to detect that I’ve entered the room and set the lights to the appropriate scene automatically. Unless it can detect when I don't want to go into a dark room and be blinded by lights I didn't want on, I want to control when it turns on. Unless it can determine that I'm only home from work for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, I don't want it to adjust the heat settings. In other words, until it can actually read my mind, I want to be able to control it and tell it what I want when I actually want it.

I'm looking into an HA setup specifically to get away from Alexa and host everything locally. I may only want simple controls, but I want to truly control everything myself.

My main use cases are Timers in Kitchen, Finding my wife's phone, and turning off music.

My main use case for voice is for things that I haven't been able to (reasonably) automate. For a couple of examples:

1. Saying "turn on the TV" as I'm grabbing lunch and walking across the room
2. "Turn on/off the stars" for bedroom mood lighting
3. "Timer for x" is honestly probably the most used things.

It's all fairly trivial stuff to do manually but I think that's probably true for the vast majority of home automation.

Even ignoring privacy arguments, I think that voice control is a great use case for running services locally - lower latency due to not having up upload your sample and the option of having it learn your accent is very attractive.

That said, voice control is irritatingly error-prone and seems to be slower than just reaching for the remote control. I agree that automatic stuff would be best, but some stuff you can't have rules for.

Something that would be interesting is a more eye- and gesture-based system: I'm thinking something like you look at the camera and slice across your throat for stop or squeeze fingers together to reduce volume. This is definitely one to run locally, for privacy and performance reasons.

My #1 use case is setting timers. My hands are messy in the kitchen, need to set 35 different timers to get the kids outta the house in the morning.

I love voice control specifically for telling the house to warm up before I get out of bed. I don't even have to grab my phone. I also use it almost daily to have music start playing from spotify.

The majority of people do not have perfect whole house motion sensors setup to turn on and off lights. Congrats, you're the 0.0001%.

Not everyone even wants lights to turn on just because the room is occupied.

My kids like it sometimes for asking it to tell knock-knock jokes, that's about it though.

How does it know what scene you want? If you walk in to a room and want to watch TV, you might want the lights to be dimmer than if you're going to read a book, for example.

For selecting an album or movie to play, it's easier to use a menu on a screen than to try to explain it verbally.

How? I can put on my best Captain Picard voice and say 'Computer, play the album Insomniac by Green Day' much faster and easier than I could pick up the remote, turn on the media player, scroll to music, scroll to G, find Green Day, scroll to Insomniac, and press play.

I've got Amazon devices (bought before I knew how bad both they and Amazon are), and they're not great. Even with them, I can walk in to my living room in the night with my hands full and tell them to turn my chosen lights on, set the brightness and colour, start playing my chosen music, or turn the TV on and start playing certain media, all while I'm walking to my seat.

The only media that I can't play is what I haven't set up to use with Alexa yet, but that would be the same for any automation.

When I get around to it, I'm going to add either Plex or Jellyfin to my voice control setup, and hopefully be able to play anything from my library in the same way :)

When you don’t want lights on all the time, it’s a good option. You can’t program automations to do things you can’t detect automatically, such as eating vs snacking, or watching a scary movie with the spouse vs watching a “scary” movie with the kids, vs watching a kids movie.

You can automate a lot, but when you have overlapping routines that don’t work together, and don’t have a way to be detected, you’re limited in your options. Voice is one solution.

Well, Ibought a few Google speakers back in the day for easy voice commands, mostly for lights and weather.

I unplugged them for privacy. Still use one in the garage for music, but it might as well be a Bluetooth speaker at this point.

And easy to hook up local home assistance would be ideal for me. I don't want to spend weeks of my time fussing with it. It's not a hobby to me, just convenience

Spot on.

What problem does it solve that a button doesn’t do with less hassle?

I'd sure like to know how you got your automation to function 100% perfectly based on simple triggers and states.

TV comes on after dusk?

What if the TV comes on in the late afternoon and normally its bright enough that it needs to close the drapes but today it's cloudy so you'd like them to be open instead so the room isn't pitch black? Or maybe you'd like to watch the backyard for some reason?

"House...open the living room drapes."

There's ALWAYS edge cases where Voice Control is useful to backstop "dumb" automatons built on triggers and states.

Sometimes:

1. I don't have an automation ready to go to do exactly the sequence of things I want to currently do.

2. I'm warm in bed and I'm lazy and I don't have a phone or computer handy.

It's pretty handy for things like being able to just say "hey Google, unlock the door" when I'm carrying a dozen bags of groceries.

I use automations as well, but sometimes I need something done outside of my otherwise-considered parameters. And it's easier to just yell your wish into being than to take out your phone, open an app, select the device, then pick your command.

Telling your house to go to sleep when you’re ready is much easier than stopping the cuddle with your wife or animals to press a button.

Wife? :p

There is no LLM, it just used to recognize simple commands such as "turn on kitchen light". What the "conversation agent" can do is very limited, though you can extend it to recognize custom commands. It's not comparable to Google Assistant/Siri, let alone ChatGPT.

Except it's been in the news that they only support their products for 5 years after release. So as Apple and other streaming services update over the years, your Sonos will stop working.

Sonos can suck it for locking settings behind an app that requires your GPS in order to function.

Seriously, connecting to the device through your computer gives you less settings than on your phone.

Homebridge is a way to get non-HomeKit devices into HomeKit. It’s what I am using for most of my stuff. It works pretty well in my opinion.