Depends on which one you have. If you buy their own smart speaker (Voice PE), which is designed to stay entirely local if you have the right hardware and software locally, and even has a hardware switch to temporarily disable the microphone, it’s pretty easy. And of you don’t have all that locally you need a paid subscription to use their cloud a little bit, but they won’t store anything. So still pretty easy.
Buy this. You can use your own voice processing on another machine on your network. You could even hook it up to your Ollama. I have it and it’s completely replaced Google Home for voice control.
How is the speaker in that? I have some atoms and the speaker sucks. Thinking about buying a bunch of these Google devices and replacing the PCB but I’d rather save the time if something like this actually has good sound.
For music, it’s not great. For voice, it’s pretty good. It’s decently loud and legible. There’s no bass. The mics however are pretty good. As far as I’ve read, you can’t get the mics to work well unless they’re tuned for that speaker in physical placement and hardware/firmware. The HA speaker uses the same kind of DSP chip that makes it possible for it to hear well in worse than ideal conditions which makes speech recognition work so well. So yeah, if you don’t wanna faff with stuff and you don’t care about music, just get it. It’s got 3.5mm TRS out if you wanna hook a proper speaker for music. The DAC is probably not amazing for HiFi but should you want to hook up something like a JBL Charge, I imagine it should work. In fact I’m planning to do this in another room where I used to use a larger Google Nest speaker for music.
Is it easy to set up a smart speaker with Home Assistant? Last I heard, it was kind of a PITA.
Depends on which one you have. If you buy their own smart speaker (Voice PE), which is designed to stay entirely local if you have the right hardware and software locally, and even has a hardware switch to temporarily disable the microphone, it’s pretty easy. And of you don’t have all that locally you need a paid subscription to use their cloud a little bit, but they won’t store anything. So still pretty easy.
Buy this. You can use your own voice processing on another machine on your network. You could even hook it up to your Ollama. I have it and it’s completely replaced Google Home for voice control.
How is the speaker in that? I have some atoms and the speaker sucks. Thinking about buying a bunch of these Google devices and replacing the PCB but I’d rather save the time if something like this actually has good sound.
For music, it’s not great. For voice, it’s pretty good. It’s decently loud and legible. There’s no bass. The mics however are pretty good. As far as I’ve read, you can’t get the mics to work well unless they’re tuned for that speaker in physical placement and hardware/firmware. The HA speaker uses the same kind of DSP chip that makes it possible for it to hear well in worse than ideal conditions which makes speech recognition work so well. So yeah, if you don’t wanna faff with stuff and you don’t care about music, just get it. It’s got 3.5mm TRS out if you wanna hook a proper speaker for music. The DAC is probably not amazing for HiFi but should you want to hook up something like a JBL Charge, I imagine it should work. In fact I’m planning to do this in another room where I used to use a larger Google Nest speaker for music.
Does it work with music assistant in HA? Thanks for the response btw