alt Hacker NewsNo, 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.
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And if it is plugged in to the wall, I'd be tempted to add a touch screen display and a camera just in case.
But really my use case is as simple as
1. Wake word, what time is it in ____
2. Wake word, how is the weather in ____
3. Wake word, will it rain/snow/?? in _____ today / tomorrow / ??
4. Wake word, what is ______
5. Wake word, when is the next new moon / full moon?
6. Wake word, when is sunrise / sunset?
And something similar like that
> but I've have great success with Home Assistant and the Home Assistant Voice Preview edition
As compared to Alexa? I bought their preview hardware (and had a home-rolled ESP32 version before that even) and things are getting closer, I can see the future where this works but we aren't there today IMHO. HA Voice (the current hardware) does not do well enough in the mic or speaker [0] department when compared to the Echos. My Echo can hear me over just about anything and I can hear it back, the HA Voice hardware is too quiet and the mic does not pick my up from the same distances or noise pollution levels as the Echo.
I _love_ my HA setup and run everything through it. I'd like nothing more than to trash all my Echos, I cam close to ordering multiple of the preview devices but convinced myself to get just 1 to test (glad I did).
Bottom line: I think HA Voice is the future (for me) but it's not ready yet, it doesn't compare to the Echos. I wish so much that my Sonos speakers could integrate with HA Voice since I already have those everywhere and I know they sound good.
[0] I use Sonos for all my music/audio listening in my house so I only care about the speaker for hearing it talk back to me, I don't need high-end audiophile speakers.