The problem I have always had with voice control is that it just doesn’t really seem to fit into my home automation. I don’t want to give Home Assistant a verbal command to turn on the lights. I want it to detect that I’ve entered the room and set the lights to the appropriate scene automatically; I haven’t touched a light switch in weeks. For selecting an album or movie to play, it’s easier to use a menu on a screen than to try to explain it verbally.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m hugely in favor of anything that runs locally instead of using the “cloud.” I think that the majority of people running a home automation server want to tinker with it and streamline it to do things on its own. I want it to “read my mind.” The people who just want a basic solution probably aren’t going to set up HA.
Funny…I’m the exact opposite. I don’t want it to detect that I’ve entered the room and set the lights to the appropriate scene automatically. Unless it can detect when I don’t want to go into a dark room and be blinded by lights I didn’t want on, I want to control when it turns on. Unless it can determine that I’m only home from work for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, I don’t want it to adjust the heat settings. In other words, until it can actually read my mind, I want to be able to control it and tell it what I want when I actually want it.
I’m looking into an HA setup specifically to get away from Alexa and host everything locally. I may only want simple controls, but I want to truly control everything myself.
I loved being able to control the dimmer level or color of the lights using voices controls.
I set up a few IFTTT recipes to create lighting and music scenes for things like reading, conversation, movie watching, date night, party time, and a few others and triggered them with a voice command.
It was always a hit with whoever I brought over, but mostly it just did 4 or 5 things with one voice command.
You can have it set more intelligently than on/off.
For example, what I have (I’m excessive btw, so this is just one option) is a light sensor that tells me how light it is outside, and then combine that information with sunrise/sunset times.
I use that to set the color of the lighting (circadian lighting style), the light level, and a ramp time to the max brightness I’d want. For rooms where there is good daylight coming in, if the light coming in from daylight is bright enough, the lights lower their brightness (daylight harvesting approach).
This isn’t in every room at the moment, as some of my lights are not RGBW LEDs. Those with regular white LEDs just dim.
Is it perfectly set for your eyes? No, but you can tweak it. My wife likes it bright than me, so I set values that I could tolerate for a nice compromise.
No RGB? Then drop the circadian lighting, keep the rest.
No light sensors? There are some APIs available out there for solar radiation values you can use (openweathermap for example). Less accurate, but probably close enough for what you want.
TL;DR version: add more conditions, and get what you want.
I have no idea how to reliably sense who or how many people are in a room, going by questions here. The presence sensors I’ve tried so far are really inadequate
even if I knew who or how many are in the room, I have no idea if there is any logic to correctly decide whether I want the light on and how much
voice control of lights is more useful to me, although Alexa is slow and I haven’t yet tried other approaches
scheduled lighting has been surprisingly useful. That reminds me, I need to schedule dining room at 20% at 6am m,w,f
Even ignoring privacy arguments, I think that voice control is a great use case for running services locally - lower latency due to not having up upload your sample and the option of having it learn your accent is very attractive.
That said, voice control is irritatingly error-prone and seems to be slower than just reaching for the remote control. I agree that automatic stuff would be best, but some stuff you can’t have rules for.
Something that would be interesting is a more eye- and gesture-based system: I’m thinking something like you look at the camera and slice across your throat for stop or squeeze fingers together to reduce volume. This is definitely one to run locally, for privacy and performance reasons.
Assistive technology has been focused on this for a while.
My brother had severe cerebral palsy and for years (80s-90s) communicated via analog technology, a literal alpha/iconography communication board, which he could tap on with a head wand. By 2000 he had a digital voice, but still had to use a wand.
Stephen Hawking demonstrated eye sensing technology almost as soon as it was invented and that’s been over a decade ago.
In most cases, there is a definite aspect of “bespokeness” to implementing assistive consumer communication technology, but the barriers implementing the same for an able audience would appear much lower.
I love voice control specifically for telling the house to warm up before I get out of bed. I don’t even have to grab my phone. I also use it almost daily to have music start playing from spotify.
Well, Ibought a few Google speakers back in the day for easy voice commands, mostly for lights and weather.
I unplugged them for privacy. Still use one in the garage for music, but it might as well be a Bluetooth speaker at this point.
And easy to hook up local home assistance would be ideal for me. I don’t want to spend weeks of my time fussing with it. It’s not a hobby to me, just convenience
This is a thing. If you don’t want motion sensors and you want it to know your cousin from your cat, Cisco and others can pinpoint the location of people on a real time map (like that map in Harry Potter) by your cell or Bluetooth.
Local cops use it to log where people were during concerts and events and see who was nearby when a bad thing happened.
I don’t use voice control since I’m against all cloud based services but am definitely interested and waiting for a good local option, paired with some decent devices that I can disseminate around the house.
I have been using ha for a very long time but am the opposite, haven’t gone down the rabbit hole and have only half a dozen automations. With the exception of living room lights that come on 39 minutes before sunset, I don’t control lights.
I have absolutely no problem using a switch as I enter a room, and see no point overcomplicating things in trying to guess what should happen when someone enters a room.
Being able to look for a recipe, set a timer, choose a youtube video, a song or a playlist while I am kneading dough and my hands are caked? Id love voice control while I’m in the kitchen and can’t touch a phone without having to clean wash and dry my hands
This is my eventual goal. I want the house to be automated to the point that the only interaction I have, is just living.
If I walk into a room, the system takes into account the time of day, day of week, outside light level, and brings the lights up.
If it’s really cold outside, it raises the radiator flow temperature. If only I’m at home, and it’s a monday morning, it only raises the temperature in the bathroom, kitchen, and my office. That kinda stuff.
The problem I have always had with voice control is that it just doesn’t really seem to fit into my home automation. I don’t want to give Home Assistant a verbal command to turn on the lights. I want it to detect that I’ve entered the room and set the lights to the appropriate scene automatically; I haven’t touched a light switch in weeks. For selecting an album or movie to play, it’s easier to use a menu on a screen than to try to explain it verbally.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m hugely in favor of anything that runs locally instead of using the “cloud.” I think that the majority of people running a home automation server want to tinker with it and streamline it to do things on its own. I want it to “read my mind.” The people who just want a basic solution probably aren’t going to set up HA.
Maybe I’m missing a use case for voice control?
Funny…I’m the exact opposite. I don’t want it to detect that I’ve entered the room and set the lights to the appropriate scene automatically. Unless it can detect when I don’t want to go into a dark room and be blinded by lights I didn’t want on, I want to control when it turns on. Unless it can determine that I’m only home from work for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, I don’t want it to adjust the heat settings. In other words, until it can actually read my mind, I want to be able to control it and tell it what I want when I actually want it.
I’m looking into an HA setup specifically to get away from Alexa and host everything locally. I may only want simple controls, but I want to truly control everything myself.
I loved being able to control the dimmer level or color of the lights using voices controls.
I set up a few IFTTT recipes to create lighting and music scenes for things like reading, conversation, movie watching, date night, party time, and a few others and triggered them with a voice command.
It was always a hit with whoever I brought over, but mostly it just did 4 or 5 things with one voice command.
You can have it set more intelligently than on/off.
For example, what I have (I’m excessive btw, so this is just one option) is a light sensor that tells me how light it is outside, and then combine that information with sunrise/sunset times.
I use that to set the color of the lighting (circadian lighting style), the light level, and a ramp time to the max brightness I’d want. For rooms where there is good daylight coming in, if the light coming in from daylight is bright enough, the lights lower their brightness (daylight harvesting approach).
This isn’t in every room at the moment, as some of my lights are not RGBW LEDs. Those with regular white LEDs just dim.
Is it perfectly set for your eyes? No, but you can tweak it. My wife likes it bright than me, so I set values that I could tolerate for a nice compromise.
No RGB? Then drop the circadian lighting, keep the rest.
No light sensors? There are some APIs available out there for solar radiation values you can use (openweathermap for example). Less accurate, but probably close enough for what you want.
TL;DR version: add more conditions, and get what you want.
Same here.
My main use cases are Timers in Kitchen, Finding my wife’s phone, and turning off music.
My main use case for voice is for things that I haven’t been able to (reasonably) automate. For a couple of examples:
It’s all fairly trivial stuff to do manually but I think that’s probably true for the vast majority of home automation.
Try “start Netflix on the TV”. Should work for most services. (At least it does with Chromecast and Home Assistant).
Even ignoring privacy arguments, I think that voice control is a great use case for running services locally - lower latency due to not having up upload your sample and the option of having it learn your accent is very attractive.
That said, voice control is irritatingly error-prone and seems to be slower than just reaching for the remote control. I agree that automatic stuff would be best, but some stuff you can’t have rules for.
Something that would be interesting is a more eye- and gesture-based system: I’m thinking something like you look at the camera and slice across your throat for stop or squeeze fingers together to reduce volume. This is definitely one to run locally, for privacy and performance reasons.
Assistive technology has been focused on this for a while.
My brother had severe cerebral palsy and for years (80s-90s) communicated via analog technology, a literal alpha/iconography communication board, which he could tap on with a head wand. By 2000 he had a digital voice, but still had to use a wand.
Stephen Hawking demonstrated eye sensing technology almost as soon as it was invented and that’s been over a decade ago.
In most cases, there is a definite aspect of “bespokeness” to implementing assistive consumer communication technology, but the barriers implementing the same for an able audience would appear much lower.
My #1 use case is setting timers. My hands are messy in the kitchen, need to set 35 different timers to get the kids outta the house in the morning.
I love voice control specifically for telling the house to warm up before I get out of bed. I don’t even have to grab my phone. I also use it almost daily to have music start playing from spotify.
I thought of doing that but now it is essentially my alarm clock. In a bit annoyed at maintaining separate alarms but:
My kids like it sometimes for asking it to tell knock-knock jokes, that’s about it though.
Well, Ibought a few Google speakers back in the day for easy voice commands, mostly for lights and weather.
I unplugged them for privacy. Still use one in the garage for music, but it might as well be a Bluetooth speaker at this point.
And easy to hook up local home assistance would be ideal for me. I don’t want to spend weeks of my time fussing with it. It’s not a hobby to me, just convenience
Spot on.
[standing ovation]
This is a thing. If you don’t want motion sensors and you want it to know your cousin from your cat, Cisco and others can pinpoint the location of people on a real time map (like that map in Harry Potter) by your cell or Bluetooth.
Local cops use it to log where people were during concerts and events and see who was nearby when a bad thing happened.
I don’t use voice control since I’m against all cloud based services but am definitely interested and waiting for a good local option, paired with some decent devices that I can disseminate around the house.
I have been using ha for a very long time but am the opposite, haven’t gone down the rabbit hole and have only half a dozen automations. With the exception of living room lights that come on 39 minutes before sunset, I don’t control lights. I have absolutely no problem using a switch as I enter a room, and see no point overcomplicating things in trying to guess what should happen when someone enters a room.
Being able to look for a recipe, set a timer, choose a youtube video, a song or a playlist while I am kneading dough and my hands are caked? Id love voice control while I’m in the kitchen and can’t touch a phone without having to clean wash and dry my hands
Friends have voice stuff, it’s pretty annoying
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This is my eventual goal. I want the house to be automated to the point that the only interaction I have, is just living.
If I walk into a room, the system takes into account the time of day, day of week, outside light level, and brings the lights up.
If it’s really cold outside, it raises the radiator flow temperature. If only I’m at home, and it’s a monday morning, it only raises the temperature in the bathroom, kitchen, and my office. That kinda stuff.