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  • Léonie Watsontink
    Oct 13, 2026, 5:35 PM

    PerlBod and I have embarked on a mission to get rid of our Echo devices and use Home Assistant instead:
    home-assistant.io/

    The basic platform is up and running on a Raspberry Pi 5. Now just waiting for some sensors and voice i/o hardware to turn-up before I can tackle the voice assistant bit.

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  • Jakob Rosinjakobrosin@universeodon.com
    Oct 13, 2026, 5:45 PM

    @tink Congratulations. Its a never ending rabbit hole where nothing is impossible. Lets just say weekends have not been the same in this house since I started tinkering with HA.

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  • Léonie Watsontink
    Oct 13, 2026, 6:47 PM

    @jakobrosin I can absolutely believe it. It's been the same here and I'm only a few days in!

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  • Bram Duvigneaubram@bramd.nl
    Oct 13, 2026, 8:19 PM

    @tink @jakobrosin I should give the voice stuff a try as well since my old Google speaker is getting more bugs every day and I already have a Home Assistant setup. What do you use for voice I/O, TTS and speech-to-text?

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  • Jakob Rosinjakobrosin@universeodon.com
    Oct 13, 2026, 8:37 PM

    @bram @tink I’ve used the home assistant voice as a satellite microphone / speaker box, with a local whisper STT and Piper TTS running on, surprisingly an intel mac book pro. In my case, the LLM processing it all was in the cloud, but with more decent hardware you could make it fully local pretty easily. WIth llm being in the cloud but rest local, I could get a plug toggled within 4 ish seconds after finishing the voice command.

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  • Bram Duvigneaubram@bramd.nl
    Oct 13, 2026, 9:04 PM

    @jakobrosin @tink Hmm, I'm running it on my home server with a modern AMD CPU and lots of cycles and RAM to spare, so local should be fine. However, not sure if that ovice hardware is still available. Would be nice to repurpose the perfectly fine hardware in Google/Echo/whatever smart speakers, but hey, that's how it goes

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  • Léonie Watsontink
    Oct 14, 2026, 9:24 AM

    @jakobrosin @bram Do you know if it's possible to change the speech rate universally using Piper? My experiments so far have used the Google TTS that was preinstalled with the HA OS and there doesn't seem to be a way to make it speak faster - and it's making my teeth itch already because it's so slow.

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  • Jakob Rosinjakobrosin@universeodon.com
    Oct 14, 2026, 3:15 PM

    @tink yes. Piper gives you quite a lot to customise, rate, cadence, intonation, pauses between words or sentences, yadda-yadda. And of course, you can likely install any tts you want, not just piper. @bram

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  • GaryWiteWulf@cyberplace.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 8:40 PM

    @neil @tink yes, that is a very valid caveat.

    I hope someone in the community will see what they’ve done, fork it and re-engineer it by hand. Because it works *really* well for most people.

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  • GaryWiteWulf@cyberplace.social
    Oct 14, 2026, 9:26 AM

    @tink as @neil pointed out though: great honking caveat of it is heavily vibe coded.

    That said, it’s working very well for me.

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  • NatalyaDNatalyaD@disabled.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 7:29 PM

    @tink I'm always extra interested to see how disabled people use home automation to make our lives easier.

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