Snips and Home Assistant: on-device voice commands at home | Hacker News Reader

Snips and Home Assistant: on-device voice commands at home

medium.com

30 pointsmfester9 comments

Hi I'm a co-founder of Snips, we are building 100% on-device AI to respect people privacy, so you can enjoy AI interface in your home, without wondering if what your children or friend say will be logged to a Google server

We would love to see people use our AI in home automation setups, so we built an easy way to connect to the great HomeAssistant code

If you have successfuly added Snips to your home, send us a message and we will showcase you if you would like!

Looks great -- excited to try it out.

Thanks echion!

Super exciting project. I'm currently renovating a flat I bought, and looked into speech-language home automation. Snips is exactly fitting my criteria of being able to control what gets send out. My only concern is the microphone setup. Alexa and Google Home seem to have quite robust solutions that work even if you aren't close to the microphone. Do you have any DIY guides to achieve something similar?

Hey Mario, OP here. Indeed, DIY guides are badly lacking in this domain. We are preparing a thorough benchmark of existing microphone array solutions. It will feature the ReSpeaker, Conexant, Matrix Creator, MicroSemi and MiniDSP which are all built for 360-degrees far-field audio capture. The goal is to have an excellent, affordable, and replicable hardware setup on par with Alexa and Google. Stay tuned!

Do you have a recommended mic setup for a Raspberry Pi? Devices like the Echo have multiple mics, etc., to detect voices in otherwise noisy rooms, so if there's something like that for a DIY setup that would be awesome.

Yes, as per my comment to badlogic, we are about to publish an in-depth guide for microphone solutions. So far, the ReSpeaker ($79, https://www.seeedstudio.com/ReSpeaker-Mic-Array-Far-field-w%...) seems to be the most promising, but the Micro Semi and MiniDSP are also good. The Matrix Creator has a lot of potential, but requires quite some tweaking to get good performance. We are eagerly waiting for their Matrix Voice to ship. We'll post our findings next week on https://labs.snips.ai.

Are there any plans for a voice input Home Assistant component similar to https://home-assistant.io/components/conversation/?

I would prefer to simply use the iOS app as a voice input instead of a dedicated mic + raspberry pi.

Otherwise, great project :)

Good idea! We haven't looked into this yet, although we are preparing iOS and Android versions of Snips which run entirely on the phone.

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