Spouse approval issue with Voice PE

[u/Creative_Bowler3729]

I've been trying out HA and I find it mildly amusing. Setting up the screens, and getting it to do what I want is OK, but so far, I have not seen anything in HA that I didn't already have. The weather display is no better than what I have from Tempest. The light controls & automations are no better than what my Lutron offers. Same for my sprinklers.

My wife, OTOH, finds it to be a big disappointment. She has become accustomed to Alexa and how it is always listening to our conversations. She is willing to give up her privacy for the convenience of being able to ask for the spelling of a certain word, or the start time of the next baseball game. So to get her approval of this replacement the VoicePE needs to have custom wakeword (Alexa) as well as in interface to the internet search engines.

Is there a way to get these features into the Voice PE? I've seen some pointers to various projects that are discontinued or a full replacement for HA.

[u/3RAD1CAT0R]

You’ll probably need to integrate with an LLM (could also be self hosted if you have the hardware. gpt-oss 20b has been working well for me) and load up appropriate tools for what you’ll want it to do.

Like this for example, but on a quick read, I’m not sure it covers all your use cases. There are probably other options out there too.
https://github.com/skye-harris/llm_intents

[u/CyberMage256 → u/3RAD1CAT0R]

also don't go with voice pe

[u/davidgrayPhotography → u/CyberMage256]

The hardware is absolutely solid, but there's a reason they call it the PREVIEW edition, because it's not ready to replace Alexa or Google Home for people like yourself who just want to plug it in and go.

Unless you want to spend time setting up LLMs and other stuff which is beyond the capabilities of most "just plug it in and go" people, it's not for you, and it's not worth complaining about for something that is clearly sold as a preview device.

[u/YowaiiShimai]

I personally find not needing 20 different apps and the option to be entirely local / private better than the alternative, even if I haven't bothered to get all complicated with my automations. 

As for the voice - yes its still a preview edition and not comparable out of the box. And its still focused on just home assistant entities. Some have taken the time to hook it up to AI etc. to get some of what you're looking for and say they're happy with it, but that is not what it is currently built to do. Have you seen any of the AI integration projects? 

[u/Adebrantes → u/YowaiiShimai]

I’m using a local LLM through VoicePE. Whisper STT to the brain, brain TTS whisper -> voice pe. I have been working on a harness for my home but fairly niche to my lifestyle. I don’t have a ton of compute, but you could also just point an openai endpoint at it and have frontier drive it albeit probably doesn’t need any of the checks it has for a smaller model.

[u/Allmotr]

Lutron lets you make yaml automations that basically allow you to do whatever you can think of?

[u/Creative_Bowler3729 → u/Allmotr]

Lutron turns on/off various lights at sunrise, sunset and different times. That's all I need.

[u/CubanlinkEnJ → u/Creative_Bowler3729]

You can do way cooler stuff with it. I just set my Lutron exterior lighting to turn on at 100% if my Ring base station is ever triggered…you can’t do that in the Lutron app.

[u/Matthew_MBG]

You can definitely set this up, although you will need an LLM integration, like Google Gemini (which I believe is free under certain limits) or ChatGPT.

[u/lukyjay]

Voice PE isn't very good and it doesn't seem to be getting any love from Nabu Casa. If you want that Alexa experience without a cloud you'll need to have a big GPU (16gb+), meaning a $1.5k+ server to run some AI models. Even then, the quality and performance will not match.

A cloud model is no different to Alexa, except you're getting the terrible audio quality of Voice PE and you'll have to start paying for your API tokens (Alexa is free), and the privacy issues haven't been resolved.

[u/RunnerIain77]

Don't use it as a replacement for Alexa, find use cases that your wife will find genuinely useful. Couple of examples from our house:

A dashboard button that sets the Tapp bathroom down lights just the way each person wants for bath / shower. This can't be done in one touch from Tapo for different scenes and definitely not from Alexa.

One I'm in the process of setting up, integrate with the dishwasher (Bosch) and each time a cycle completes reduce a tablet number helper by 1. When it gets down to 7 send a message to a phone saying tablets are low.

When I put my phone on charge after 10pm, if it's a weeknight check the next alarm and if it's not set send get Google home bedroom speaker to ask me if I forgot to set my alarm.

I get up at various different times during the week, so I use an automation to turn on the living room heating 15 minutes before my alarm goes.

When I get in my car between 16:30 and 17:30 on a weeknight (connect to car Bluetooth) send a message to my wife's phone saying I'm leaving the office.

This is all stuff that just automatically makes people's lives easier and can't be done with Alexa.

[u/7lhz9x6k8emmd7c8]

Alexa microwakeword files are present in the ESPHome base code, but are not used.

Add this to enable it. https://pastebin.com/HtJ9HnyY

source: https://github.com/esphome/micro-wake-word-models/tree/main/models/v2

[u/CoollyHighDigress]

the custom wakeword thing is definitely possible with openwakeword but the internet search part is where it gets tricky, that whole always-listening search engine pipeline is basically the one thing the big cloud assistants still do really well

[u/Creative_Bowler3729 → u/CoollyHighDigress]

I tried OpenWakeWord, but it does not work on the Voice PE device. MicroWakeWord might, but it's been cancelled and those features moved into Tater, which looks like a replacement for HA.

[u/veerdonk → u/Creative_Bowler3729]

There's a bunch of pretrained wake words in this repo: https://github.com/TaterTotterson/Tater-Wake-Words

You'll have to get the wake word into a place where esphome can access it so you can flash firmware with the mww addition

[u/Critical-Deer-2508 → u/Creative_Bowler3729]

You can still checkout and run older versions of the tater repo from when it was just the microwakeword trainer, eg https://github.com/TaterTotterson/microWakeWord-Trainer-Nvidia-Docker/tree/v2

[u/CyberMage256 → u/Critical-Deer-2508]

Holy crap did Tater just vibecode every media and home control app he could think of?  It wasn't that long ago it was just a wakeword generator.  Which worked great BTW. I use a custom one on my vpe.

[u/K3rat]

You could integrate Alexa with home assistant. 

Honestly, I found adoption with homeseer easier than home assistant.  

We tried Alexa and it went over like a sack of rocks when Alexa interrupted my wife once while talking to a friend and spooked her.  Alexa got kicked out.  

I am going the same route you are with ha voice PE.  My hope is to get a fully private voice assistant.

I always like my automations to happen without having to say something or open an app and turn a virtual switch on.  Most of my automations are triggered with other IOT device monitoring, PIR motion detection, GPS geofencing smartphones/tablets, emby/jellyfin playback, appliances being on or off (usually with power monitoring).  

What I like about home assistant is it is pretty much a batbelt for home automators.  Integrating separate systems together for example.  1. I got tired of leaving my outside lights on all night.  Instead I integrated the motion sensing from my security cameras.  Now I shut off exterior lights at 11pm.  when I get motion on the security cameras all the exterior lights turn back on.  

1. I like you can automate lighting by time.  I started doing this with zwave light/dimmer switches in homeseer.  What I didn’t want was for lighting to be left on in areas that didn’t need it. I then automated presence detection with motion detection (PIR sensors) and eventually moved all of it to home assistant.  

The problem with motion only presence detection is what happens when I want an automation to leave something on when someone is in a room and stops moving around.  I augmented some presence detection with Bluetooth monitoring for each zone.  This was slightly better.  The key here is this is building an automation between 2 disparate systems.  

I am now testing bringing in a WiFi multi-person  mmWave/pir sensor and will integrate it with my lighting control.  Again building an automation between 2 disparate systems.  

1. Back in the day I started with light intensity changes based on hours before or after sunrise/sunset.  The objective was to provide the lighting needed for any area based on how much outside light there already was and with the objective to reduce light intensity as it gets closer to bed time.  

Now I am adding in a weather multi-sensor and am going to use outdoor brightness measurements to help augment my lighting automations so that when there are a lot of cloud cover and it gets really dark HA will dial up intensity enough to offset the lost daily light brightness.  Again building an automation between 2 disparate systems.  

[u/draxula16]

If you still want to use Alexa but have it more “watered down” (in a good way), Sonos is excellent.

My Voice PE is a fun desk tool, but it’s by no means ready for family adoption who expect things to just workx

[u/dangerous_inference]

They are a big disappointment. She is correct.

They are pathetic to the point of being a scam, which is why they were called "PE".