So my girlfriend has an Alexa and really likes it but I’m not comfortable living in a house with one. How much technical knowledge would I need to make a speaker that connects to a music player app and is voice activated because that is all she uses it for.
I figure I could hook up a raspberry pi to a speaker and add a mic and voice command software that I find somewhere but I’ve never actually done anything like this before.
How feasible is this
Home assistant declared this year to be the year of the voice. There’s a ton of development happening to achieve this with full local control.
And here is hardware that works with home assistant.
Take a look at Mycroft
Thought that was a dead project
The community forked the core a while back: https://github.com/openVoiceOS/
See also https://neon.ai/, which builds on top of OVOS, and is who the Mycroft company officially passed the reigns to.
If you are not in the mood for doing much tinkering, there is a German electronics manufacturer called TechniSat and they sell a multi-function radio called DIGITRADIO 3 VOICE. It has an offline voice assistant. The voice commands can be used to pause, change audio source, increase volume, etc. The radio deck has okay-ish sound, I wouldn’t call it hi-fi but it doesn’t sound like two tin cans. The function is actually for blind people (I bought one for my grandma who is legally blind), but I guess privacy enthusiasts would find it adequate, too.
Mycroft?
Not maintained since 2022…
Until someone with more experience finds this thread, I have seen these services recommended: Rhasspy with Home Assistant .io. Rhasspy is entirely offline, and this is Home Assistant’s privacy policy.
