Home Assistant Voice – Preview Edition is a small USB-powered unit made by the Open Home Foundation and supplied to me by SEEED.
It is common knowledge that I hate to read instructions, so I took the unit out of the very nice box and plugged it into a handy USB wall socket – hoping it would power up with an access point and ask me to connect it to my WiFi – as so often happens when first using an IOT gadget. Erm, no. It powered up with an impressive undulating white(ish) light but no access point.
In the box, there is a QR code to be scanned – this took me to https://voice-pe.home-assistant.io on my phone. I immediately swapped over to my PC browser.
Left – 3 large blocks – “Getting Started”, “Documentation”, “FAQ”. Good start. Back to the phone – the unit initially communicates by Bluetooth. The white light I mentioned is described as a “warm white twinkle animation”.
In the phone Home Assistant companion APP – “New Devices Discovered”. I hit “check it out”.
“home-assistan-091d98 Improv via BLE” – their spelling, not mine. I selected ADD in the Home Assistant Android companion APP…. “The device requires authorization, please press the authorization button or consult the device’s manual for how to proceed”. I pressed the centre button on the unit at which point it went off to do updates.
“Say ‘Okay Nabu’ to wake the device up”. It asked me to repeat that twice. I did. Fine. Looks like I have some kind of running local voice assistant now. The dialog in the companion APP then wanted me to try some light control examples – but as I already have those working on Google, I skipped that.
A minute later I returned to the box and said “Ok Nabu” and a red ring light came on briefly then went off.
So that’s it – a small USB-powered neat box with a 3.5mm jack socket in case you want to use an external speaker and a “Grove” port underneath. There is also a side switch which defaulted to a red mark and which, if changed, acts as a MUTE switch for privacy.
Looking at the image below left you’ll see an example “Turn on the lights in the bedroom” – I ignored that…. Then there’s an option to use “Home Assistant cloud” – ideal if you don’t have a powerful system at home” – well, I do now – so I ignored that. Also – doesn’t using the cloud kind of defeat the point of a “local” voice assistant?
“Do it yourself” – “Setup with add-ons”. I ignored that – I don’t think I should have….
It seems I needrf add-ons whisper and Piper. I reset the device (current first answer AI instructions on Google are wrong – the reset is a long press of the button on the front of the unit – the AI said there’s a reset on the back – there isn’t). Home Assistant website says to remove reference to the unit in HAOS then reboot HAOS twice and perform that hardware reset on the unit.
I did and when I came back later – I started again.
On my second attempt – Piper installed automatically – when it came to Whisper… I got the error shown below right…
So, I need to go get help…
Attempt 3 – making sure the device was reset and removed from Home Assistant. I turned the device on and looked for notifications in Home Assistant before pressing any buttons or doing anything other than applying power to the device.
Here we go: This time I set it all up on my PC. I wasn’t asked for anything other than – would I like to install the device? at which point it asked me to repeat the keyphrase “OK NABU” twice and put my WiFi details in. I did that – then noticed a second identical device appear. I IGNORED that.
In for a penny…. One example given was to say “OK Nabu – what time is it?” – I said exactly that and the device simply said the time… “5:12pm”. That was the second time request as the first time I jumped in with the question just as the device was beeping acknowledgement of the keyphrase. It seems I’m not the only one to notice that you need a somewhat annoying gap after the keyphrase and before giving an instruction.
The second time I showed more patience and it worked just fine. I was asked to go into “settings – voice assistants – expose”. I exposed an aliexpress LED 220v light to the new assistant. I was asked for an alias “At random I picked “shelf right” because the light is on the right side of a shelf in my office.
And lo and behold, when I later said “Ok Nabu, turn shelf right off” – the light went off. WELL, “Ok Nabu, set shelf right to green” – IT WORKED. Mind you, not to get too excited. The device wasn’t happy with either “turn on shelf right” or “shelf right on” – Google would be OK with both of those. But HEY – this is LOCAL.
Now to get rid of that “Ok Nabu” as there are alternatives available… but when I switched to “Hey Jarvis” – nothing. It seems I’m not the only one having trouble with Jarvis… there are blogs and videos on the subject. Back to “Ok Nabu”.
Change of mind on an instruction? “Ok Nabu – cancel” – “I don’t understand that”. Google would handle that gracefully….
Am I going to jump ship to this local assistant? Well, not right now. I use Google via the somewhat limited Node-Red HA nodes and Google Home nodes (because I’m too tight to use Home Assistant Cloud – yet another monthly outlay) – Google just works – but I’ll grant you – this was super easy to set up…. for Google, I have to create nodes for all conditions in Node-Red and not all options are available. Here, I tell the voice assistant about a device entity and that’s that… kind of…. “Hey nabu – set shelf right to red”. It works.
BUT – “Hey Nabu, turn off shelf right” – “sorry I’m not aware of a device called off shelf right”. Some way to go then.
“Hey Nabu – turn shelf right on” – turned on the light.
“Hey Nabu – turn shelf right off” – “sorry I couldn’t understand that”. Oh dear me… now I can’t turn the light off.
Ok so I turned the light off manually and then – possibly not pausing long enough – “Hey Nabu – turn shelf right on” – it turned on the light but then said “Sorry I’m not aware of a device called shelf right” – really? Sounds like Alexa.
Ah, but here’s a trick “Hey Nabu – turn off THE shelf right” – that worked. Second time though, a blue flashing light came on and stayed on in the unit – I had to pull the power and start again.
You’re going to see some enthusiastic reviews by readers averse to using the cloud and/or wanting full voice control of their devices (I always have button-press backups for any voice commands) – just bear this write-up in mind – fully updated firmware, fast mini-PC running HAOS with 8GB RAM and TONS of storage – N95 processor – this should be working just fine, surely?
“Hey Nabu – set shelf right to 100%” – “Sorry, I didn’t understand that”. Give me a break.
I’ve seen people suggesting this might work better with an online LLM, but isn’t the whole point of this unit to work offline? Going down the online voice route, Google Home works just fine, though I’ve deliberately chosen to use just a few commands for controlling lighting and heating. See my Node-RED (within HAOS) setup below… as you’ll see, the Voice Preview device setup is much simpler – but in the end, for a voice unit to work in a household of mixed technical ability/interest – it has to be very understanding, responsive and straightforward to use.
Typically my wife will say “OK Google, please turn on the livingroom” whereas I have it down to bare minimum “OK Google, livingroom ON”. Because of the limits of home-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket or my understanding of it – I’m limited in the commands I can send (I see nothing like light colour control for example). I could fire off MQTT commands to Home Assistant for Google but I don’t quite understand what to send in various scenarios right now.
I abandoned Alexa early on as find it VERY picky about device names – I have both Google and Alexa as I can’t separate my wife from her Alexa Show for some reason (she asks it about timers, deliveries and little else – but when Amazon start charging for “AI enhancements”, that might put her off.
For reference I have a Google Nest Mini (37.50 Euros in Spain) in the hallway and if I need my Home Assistant to respond to voice outside of it’s (decent) audio range, I simply talk to my Android phone (from anywhere) – same result. I did make a small voluntary contribution to the author of the Google Home nodes. On the other hand I’m seeing the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition going for as much as 75 Euros… didn’t someone say it would be around $60 in the USA? How does that equate to 75 Euros? Should be LESS, not MORE…
I’ll keep experimenting with different options now I have this device – but at this point I’m thinking “needs improvement”.Ultrimately this device could offer FAR more powerful voice control of devices than my node-red nodes – but it needs to do a better job of handling voices AND work well locally. Worth revisiting from time to time. If you have the time and ability to do LOTS of experimenting – the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition might be for you.
Anyway – here is a link to the product on Seeed’s website along with a link to their ESP32S3 board.