Its founder, Paulus Schoutsen, shared a blog post last week announcing a new project that could localize all voice commands that control smart devices without the need to connect to a cloud owned by assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. The voice assistant is targeted to be available in 2023.
Schoutsen also runs Nabu Casa, a company that effectively provides first-party cloud services for Home Assistant and also contributes to the development of the free platform.
Nabu Casa needed someone with experience to create a voice assistant, so he hired developer Michael Hansen to lead the project. Hansen was the creator of another open source product called Rhasspy, a voice assistant supported by his own community that integrated the technology into the solution they were trying to build.
Schoutsen wrote that working with multiple languages is one of Nabu Casa’s top priorities for the new voice assistant. The Home Assistant app’s user interface currently supports 62 languages, and Schoutsen hopes the community can help with making all languages spoken.
You’ll soon be able to talk to the home assistant without Google, Siri or Alexa
The Home Assistant audio product won’t be able to do what you would initially expect a smart speaker to do. Schoutsen explains: “We will limit the number of possible actions and focus on the basics of interacting with your smart home to keep the work ahead of us manageable. There will be no web searching, no searching or voice gaming.”
Voice assistants often have built-in “smart” internet-connected functions that are great for things like answering trivia questions or checking match scores. Alexa and Google Assistant are particularly good at being “know-it-all”/”do-it-all” devices, but these capabilities can complicate things a bit if all you need is just one smart home controller, and Apple’s Siri is the easiest for home commands and It is considered the fastest voice assistant, but still requires an internet connection to work, whereas Home Assistant’s solution will be purely native.
Voice assistant products have become a costly category for leading companies like Amazon, which laid off thousands of employees last month, and the Alexa division reportedly suffered the biggest cuts. And as Ars Technica points out, Google and Amazon have sold their audio hardware at cost to quickly increase the install base of their respective assistants.