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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

I have a question. Why has it taken this long for a replacement for Alexa to show up? All we need is something hooked up to, say, ChatGPT that lets me control my house stuff, set timers, add to a shopping list etc... And it can generate JSON for all that which can then get picked up and relayed over the wire.

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You can semi-DIY it already with Rhasspy + your choice of home automation stack (HomeAssistant or what-have-you). Rhasspy is probably what you're looking for.

https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy

Was discussed last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705938

My only real issue in setting it up and running it has been finding appropriate microphones.

You throw audio into an LLM and get a function call back. Okay.

An API call to OpenAI whisper costs around 0.01ct per minute, so really cheap. Feeding the text-from-speech and the possible function calls with their JSON schema into the LLM costs another penny. Everything works.

But now, where's your business model?

Alexa is perfectly fine for that even without ChatGPT-like capabilities. The Skills situation might be a disaster, but if you just want to control devices in your home, it's great. The level of integration with pretty much anything is amazing.

I would really like it to be far more intelligent. For example, if I give it a request like “decorate all the lights in my house with Christmas colors“, it should know what to do.

Other than Siri and Google Home?

ChatGPT would be terrible at adding stuff to a shopping list.

But entertaining for a few minutes!

What makes you think that? It’s all about the prompting.

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