I think it’s a pretty cool toy to play with. It mostly gets used for setting timers and playing music, but you can add Home Assistant automations that trigger when you say certain things. Lot’s to play with if that’s your idea of fun!

Home Assistant sells units with duel microphones that aren’t too expensive and work relatively well. But the local voice recognition wasn’t great last I tried.

Similar to the other user’s response, I use the calendar integration, then add the things on the calendar (say, putting the recycling out to be collected). Then I have an automation that will read out a reminder at the time it is scheduled for in the calendar.

So the evening before recycling pickup every fortnight, it pipes up and says “Reminder: Recycling” or whatever.

Works pretty well for these regular reoccurring things. I haven’t tried using it for one off reminders, and you can’t say “ok nabu, remind me to wish Steve a happy birthday on the 27th of February” or anything like that. Still, I’m pretty happy.

I seem to remember needing a bit of playing to get the notification working, I’m happy to look up and post what I have in my automation if needed.

In Home Assistant, in the settings, if you go to Voice Assistants then click the … on your assistant and click Debug, you can see what it thought you said (and what it did).

Setting a timer on an up to date Home Assistant will repeat back what it set. E.g. If I say “Set a timer for 2 minutes” it will say “Timer set for 2 minutes”. It says “Done” when running some Home Assistant task/automation, so it’s probably not understanding you correctly (hence what the debug option is good for). I use the cloud voice recognition as I couldn’t get the local version to understand my accent when I tried it (a year ago). It’s through Azure but is proxied by Home Assistant so they don’t know it’s you.

The wake word responds to me, but not my girlfriend’s voice.

My wife swears it’s sexist, she has a bit of trouble too. In the integration options you can set the sensitivity to make it more sensitive, but it does increase false activations. I have it on the most sensitive and she can activate it first time most of the time.

I agree that it’s not production ready and they know that too, hence the name. But in relation to your points, I plugged in some speaker as it’s not really that great of a speaker at all.

For the wake word, at some point they did an update to add a sensitivity setting so you can make it more sensitive. You could also ty donating your voice to the training: https://ohf-voice.github.io/wake-word-collective/

But all in all you’re spot on with the challenges. I’d add a couple more.

With OpenAI I find it can outperform other voice assistants in certain areas. Without it, you come up across weird issues, like my wife always says “set timer 2 minutes” and it runs off to OpenAI to work out what that means. If you says “set a timer for 2 minutes” it understands immediately.

What I wish for is the ability to rewrite requests. Local voice recognition can’t understand my accent so I use the proxied Azure speech to text via Home Assistant Clound, and it regularly thinks I’m saying “Cortana” (I’m NEVER saying Cortana!)

Oh and I wish it could do streaming voice recognition instead of waiting for you to finish talking then waiting for a pause before trying anything. My in-laws have a google home and if you say something like “set a timer for 2 minutes” it immediately responds because it was converting to text as it went, and knew that nothing more was coming after a command like that. HAVP has perhaps a 1 second delay between finishing speaking and replying, assuming it doesn’t need another 5 seconds to go to open AI. And you have to be quiet in that 1 second otherwise it thinks you’re still talking (a problem in a busy room).

Nothing says they have a successful AI product as much as needing your staff to work 70 hour weeks. Shouldn’t AI startups be advertising how their staff are so efficient they only work 10 hours a week but do their full performance?

Damn, your dentist is playing 4D chess and it seems like they are winning - make it seem so hard that you do nothing and end up needing to spend a fortune.

I use an electric toothbrush with a flossing head twice a day, for 2 mins if I can pay attention that long, and my dentist says a checkup and clean every two years is more than enough because my teeth are so good.

What are you supposed to spend that time doing? Overbrushing damages teeth, so you should do 2 minutes twice a day.

You perhaps should floss every day. And you’re slow so it takes you 11 minutes.

What are you supposed to do with the remaining 45 minutes? Snuggle up and watch half a movie with them?

It’s really just a single celled protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2oEnJfZ9joY

Nah someone else linked the original image: https://www.reddit.com/r/Goatparkour/comments/bto7j1/from_this_angle_mountain_goats_are_even_more/

It’s like some weird AI regeneration of it or something?

You may be misunderstanding how thing work.

Average people create their own communities. Those people control those communities. You can make a community for cars, and if someone poats about busses you can remove the post. The person who makes a community is the one that controls it.

It has nothing to do with the platform, you are just posting in a community run by people who don’t want that kind of post there. So pick a different community? And read the side bar before you post.

Piefed operates the same way.

I fuck things up often enough that I don’t need to do it for fun.

The same in NZ. Is this that you never ever wear shoes on inside?

Is it acceptable to walk into your own house and walk around with shoes on? Sure.

Do most people do that most of the time? In my experience, people will be shoes off in their own home most of the time, but it’s not some big taboo to keep them on if you’re popping in to grab something.

Maybe but hardly anyone had 32GB of RAM 5 years ago so that’s unlikely to feed into the average. My original thought was that I don’t think the average will go down, because people will keep their current hardware for longer. Maybe we will see mobos with modern sockets and DDR4 support if this drags on, but hopefully the bubble will burst by Christmas and we’ll all be picking up refurbished DDR5 for pennies from the decommissioned data centres.

Well the last couple of years is pretty restrictive. If you’re upgrading every few years you’ll probably just bite the bullet and pay for the RAM.

My last comment was basically saying you can upgrade to the top of the line CPU that fits your mobo, giving you an upgrade for not too much cash. Better than forking out for DDR5.

Not necessarily, most people will be able to upgrade their CPU to a better model with the same socket. Sockets aren’t updated every time a CPU is released, and most people won’t be buying the top of the top even if they were, meaning there’s room to grow as prices drop.

I just find it hard to imagine people will buy a worse computer instead of keeping the one they have, but I’ll happily admit it if I turn out to be wrong.

Yeah but we are talking about a widespread drop in the average, which I’d think would be more influenced by people upgrading (or not) rather than gear dying.

Among gamers?

I didn’t even realise 32 was standard, I’ve really only seen 8 or 16 for normal consumer grade stuff.

But wouldn’t people just stick with their current PC instead of downgrade?

Especially because they very likely can get a better CPU with the same socket, and a better graphics card.

I find it hard to imagine a scenario where you would go to less RAM instead of keeping what you have.