this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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Go with Home Assistant and never use some proprietary hub again.
Is there a list of stuff it's compatible with? I have a pi I'm running some shit on now, automation may be fun if I can avoid proprietary garbo.
It's compatible with everything. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/
Oh damn it can be a voice assistant or whatever they're called too?
Yeah alright I'll be looking into that tomorrow lol
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.
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 😂
It works incredibly well with HomeKit too. I use Siri to control my HA managed devices all the time.
Not quite everything.
I can’t get my Meross garage door module into HA so I’m stuck using HomeKit exclusively. But I control most things through my phone so it hasn’t been a problem, just limits some automations I can do with it.