alt Hacker NewsThere is a huge market segment waiting here. At least I think there is. Well, at least people like me want this. Ok, tens of dollars can be made at least. It is just missing a critical tipping point. Basically, I want an alexa like device for the home backed by local inference and storage with some standardized components identified:
- the interactive devices - all the alexa/google/apple devices out there are this interface, also, probably some TV input that stays local and I can voice control. That kind of thing. It should have a good speaker and voice control. It probably should also do other things like act as a wifi range extender or be the router. That would actually be good. I would buy one for each room so no need for crazy antennas if they are close and can create true mesh network for me. But I digress.
- the home 'cloud' server that is storage and control. This is a cheap CPU, a little ram and potentially a lot of storage. It should hold the 'apps' for my home and be the one place I can back-up everything about my network (including the network config!)
- the inference engines. That is where this kind of repo/device combo comes in. I buy it and it knows how to advertise in a standard way its services and the controlling node connects it to the home devices. It would be great to just plug it in and go.
Of course all of these could be combined but conceptually I want to be able to swap and mix and match at these levels so options here and interoperability is what really matters.
I know a lot of (all of) these pieces exist, but they don't work well together. There isn't a simple standard 'buy this turn it on and pair with your local network' kind of plug and play environment.
My core requirements are really privacy and that it starts taking over the unitaskers/plays well together with other things. There is a reason I am buying all this local stuff. If you phone home/require me to set up an account with you I probably don't want to buy your product. I want to be able to say 'Freddy, set timer for 10 mins' or 'Freddy, what is the number one tourist attraction in South Dakota' (wall drugs if you were wondering)
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A bit like HomeAssistant Voice? https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
I've just started using it but I'd recommend https://github.com/steipete/clawdis, you need to set it up a bit but it's really cool to just be able to do things on the go by just texting an assistant. You can see all the different ways people are using it @clawdbot on twitter.
Keen for this also. Been having issues getting a smooth voice experience from HA to ChatGPT. I dont like the whole wakeword concept for the receiver either. I think theres work to be done on the whole stack.
There is but that market doesn't sell subscriptions and that is what tech giants wants to sell - renewable flow of money that will keep flowing even if product stagnates because effort to move to competition is big.
It sounds like you want Home Asisstant.
You have all of the different components:
* you can use a number of things for the interactive devices (any touchscreen device, buttons, voice, etc)
* have it HA do the basic parsing (word for word matching), with optionally plugging into something more complex (cloud service like ChatGPT, or self-hosted Ollama or whatever) for more advanced parsing (logical parsing)
Every part of the ecosystem is interchangeable and very open. You can use a bunch of different devices, a bunch of different LLMs to do the advanced parsing if you want it. HA can control pretty much everything with an API, and can itself be controlled by pretty much anything that can talk an API.
And there never will be. You know why? Because the giant corporations can't suck up all your data and tailor advertisements to you. Why sell a good thing once, when you can sell crappy shovelware ridden with ads and a subscription service every month?
The sota chatbots are getting more and more functionality that is not just LLM inference. They can search the web, process files, integrate with other apps. I think that's why most people will consider local LLMs to be insufficient very soon.
I've been working on this on and off for a couple of years now, the loop is definitely closing, I think it's possible at this point but not yet easy.
And toys
> Well, at least people like me want this.
Yeah because dynamic digital price signs in shops based on what data vendors have about you and AI can extract from it are such fun! Total surveillance. More than what's already happening. Such fun!
No, there isn't a plug and play one yet, but I've have great success with Home Assistant and the Home Assistant Voice Preview edition and its goal is pretty much to get rid of Alexa.
I'd imagine you'd have a bunch of cheap ones in the house that are all WiFi + Mic + Speakers, streaming back to your actual voice processing box (which would cost a wee bit more, but also have local access to all the data it needs).
You can see quite quickly that this becomes just another program running on a host, so if you use a slightly beefier machine and chuck a WiFi card in as well you've got your WiFi extenders.