Their latest round of stupidity pops up a new EULA and forces you to take it or, again, you can’t access your stuff. But that’s just more unenforceable garbage, so who cares, right? Well, it’s getting worse.
It seems they are planning on dropping an update which will force you to log in. Yep, no longer will your stuff Just Work across the local network. Now it will have yet another garbage “cloud” “integration” involved, and they certainly will find a way to make things suck even worse for you.
If you ever saw the South Park episode where they try to get the cable company to do something on their behalf and the cable company people just touch themselves inappropriately upon hearing the lamentations of their customers, well, I suspect that’s what’s going on here. The management of these places are fundamentally sadists, and they are going to auger all of these things into the ground to make their short-term money before flying the coop for the next big thing they can destroy.
Yes for sure with Google or Alexa and I think HA is working on their own voice stuff, but haven’t looked into it too deeply as I haven’t really ever utilized voice commands apart from tinkering with them briefly. A spare Pi works great but you can also use other stuff like a cheap Dell Optiplex micro or and old laptop. If you use the Pi, I’d recommend installing a small SSD with it and running it off that versus an SD card. The card won’t last long with all the read/writes.
They already have a sort of functional “Assistant”. You can type to it, or you can use OpenAI’s Whisper speech-to-text language model loaded up on your Home Assistant machine through an add-on in order to talk to it, it works pretty much as well as any other proprietary speech to text model, except it’s self hosted. The assistant can talk back with another add-on, though the voices are still too robotic IMO.
Key part in all of this is the “sort of functional” bit. Commands seem to have to be very literal to be understood, otherwise it just tells you it doesn’t understand.
I’d still rather host my own assistant than rely on Google or Alexa, though, so I’m just gonna put my faith on the HASS team.
It works incredibly well with HomeKit too. I use Siri to control my HA managed devices all the time.
Oh yeah I already have an external drive on it, I run a handful of services on it now, but I need to start fresh again anyway because that’s easier than troubleshooting why it’s going derpy.
In true IT fashion, instead of troubleshooting I just scheduled a nightly reboot 😂