Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers

I’m having déjà vu… ThirdReality had released “Voice and Music Assistant Dev Edition,” which looks exactly like Pine Voice Smart Speaker.

https://www.thirdreality.com/products/voice-music-assistant-...

EDIT: but unlike Pine, ThirdReality one comes with quad-core ARM A53 CPU; 256MB RAM; 512MB flash; and can actually do audio processing. The price is about 1.5 times higher though

I've spent countless hours searching for a small, good quality passive speaker. In a roughly 4 inch cube size. That comes with an good (acoustically) box/enclosure. Plenty exist in various forms (kits) but I never know if they sound as good as even laptop or phone speakers. Which is a low bar, but still can't find good reviews.

I'm half surprised they are still around as they seem to never restock most of their products, and half pleased they are still around and releasing products.

I really wish someone would come out with a $25 "box" that sits on top of my bookshelf speaker that allows me to Airplay to it and power said speaker with a ~50w class-D amp. Then if I have multiple ones, it would allow them to pair and setup stereo or surround sound. I might even pay $50 for it. Kinda like a Sonos Amp but not at that price point.

I’ll wait for the reviews. I bought the Home Assistant Voice Preview device and it was underwhelming. Bad speaker, bad mic, bad pickup. I really wanted to like it but my Echo blew it out of the water.

I’m deep into the HA system so I cannot wait for Echo-quality that I can attach to my HA.

i wish for and fantasize about building something like this every time my alexa starts following up with an ad for a feature i will never want or use. glad to see this exists!

> With just 32 MiB of embedded pSRAM memory and 16 MiB of flash, and 128 KiB ROM storage, the specs may sound meagre – although in the current AI climate, generous – but this is an embedded device not a full-blown PC hiding in an aroma diffuser1.

It somewhat reminds me of the PineCube, which had 128MB DDR3. Once the Linux tax was paid it was basically unusable.

> Factory shipped firmware is open-source and provides Wyoming Satellite, compatible with assistence platforms such as Home Assistant.

They are at least supposed to be able to show it working with some factory software [1]. I would have just liked to have seen some edge compute capability.

[1] https://pine64.org/documentation/PineVoice/

Would love for Pine64 to thrive.

I don't own any of their products, but I am glad they exist.

As someone who was burned by Mycroft going bankrupt: I want to believe

It’s funny that it comes with a 30 day warranty.

I love that this is out and one day hope to replace my alexas and whatnot so I can turn on my lights without hearing an ad for amazon prime.

Dont mind if i do

Does this use _local_ processing of voice commands?

i just wonder how good it sounds. open audiophile grade hardware is something of a gap.

> PineVoice is in an early-stage development and early adopters will encounter quirks and performance issues. Future firmware updates should resolve issues in time, but like all of Pine64’s products, you’re not buying a consumer-grade product.

Like the Penny Arcade comic about a director who’s making a movie that’s not meant for the critics. “Wait, you can do that?”

Does this device allow raw access to the microphone array? Considering the SoC I might want to stream it elsewhere for processing. How many independent channels does the array provide?

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