I use it to set and manage timers in the kitchen. It's not as good as Google, and the setup to get timers working is hacky, but it does the job and has fully replaced my Google Home when combined with a home assistant dashboard I have on my kitchen wall.

That is amazing and very interesting,

I think all the stuff with home automation is kinda unnecessary, but sometimes I find it cool and interesting, mostly when it is something local.

https://heywillow.io/ seems to solve the voice recognition pretty well. I don't know how good the home automation integration is, though.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Right now, with some off-the-shelf gear and the patience to flash and fiddle, you can ask “Nabu” or “Jarvis” or any name you want to turn off some lights, set the thermostat, or run automations.

It’s not entirely fair to compare locally run, privacy-minded voice control to the “assistants” offered by globe-spanning tech companies with secondary motives.

While outgrowers are happy to leave behind the inconsistent behavior, privacy concerns, or limitations of their old systems, they can miss being able to just shout from anywhere in a room and have a device figure out their intent.

Here’s a look at what you can do today with your human voice and Home Assistant, what remains to be fixed and made easier, and how it got here.

All that said, it’s impressive how far Home Assistant has come since late 2022, when it made its pronouncement, despite not really having a clear path toward its end goal.

And the work continues; between writing and publishing this post, Home Assistant has already improved its voice error responses.

The original article contains 486 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Well there is an OpenAI integration which can be configured to work with local gpt. Then everything is local. It is not perfect, but in some aspects definitely impressive.

Yeah it's still pretty bad