This here. On top of what he said above I would mention that you want this to be as easy to maintain as possible so using Nabu Casa’s Alexa cloud integration saves you the hassle of having to do some complicated setup.

Years ago I went through the steps to do the google project/workspace tutorial to setup integrating with google home and it was a pain, especially getting it to allow google devices to talk locally. If it blows up and requires setting up again with the same complications I’ll either swap to the cloud thing(already pay the Nabu Casa sub to support them) or just move to running voice locally.

I’ve been messing with running local voice satellites the past couple months and they are way better than I thought they’d be. Been running an HA VPE in my office and has been so good I’ve removed the google home from that room. This past weekend I used this project to return an old shield tablet into a display satellite. Has a few things to left to iron out but I’m liking it.

All that to say, I’d never do all that work in a location I don’t live in😂. Pay the sub and live your life.

Same make and model is fine, but you do want to make sure they are from different batches if you can. Reduces the chances of multiple drive failure occurring at the same time.

Sorry, I don’t think home assistant supports Funscript atm.

Thanks for the post, was an interesting read

Don’t misunderstand. Openwakeword works great. I just think it’s awesome that the hotword detection can run so well directly on low powered devices now.

About STT I’ll agree that they can run well, I just found the experience a lot better on a heavier model running on a beefier machine. They do well in a silent space but struggle when you add background noise.

Im sure this works but from my recent experience you need your STT on a machine more powerful than a PI atm. Tiny models are just not accurate enough and the bigger ones need more than the PI has to give any sort of decent response time. Compared to where this was two years ago I look forward to where it is in two more.

One of the largest improvements imo has been microwakeword and the ability to run the hotword detection “on device” but I believe it only runs on ESP32 devices so not an option if want everything on a pi.

I spent a little bit of time getting a fully local voice pipeline setup in home assistant last month and I’d say it is near perfect(after adding a few additional community integrations) with the exception of the microphones on current hardware. I look forward to the next HA voice device from Nabu Casa.

My understanding is that it will off you apply those changes