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?
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.
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.
You wake up one day with a bad headache, and bright light hurts your eyes. You can close the curtains, but every room is set to turn the lights on to the brightness that you usually prefer.
How do you manage something like this? Do you have to adjust everything with your phone and reset it when you feel better?
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My main use cases are Timers in Kitchen, Finding my wife’s phone, and turning off music.
I don’t think Sonos gets enough credit for their local voice control capability. It can’t be integrated into home assistant to do anything beyond controlling the Sonos speakers, but I have been ABSOLUTELY blown away by how responsive the voice commands have been. Literally a 100% success rate after using it for a couple months now. It correctly interprets if you want to start/stop playing, can find music by the artist I want from Apple Music (not sure about other streaming services), and will correctly adjust playing status for a specific speaker if you say to adjust music on that speaker only - even if you command it from another room.
The best part - no bullshit worst responses about “by the way….” Like on Alexa. At most, you get a short response like “good choice” or “ok”.
Sonos isn’t cheap, but I would 100% buy them again every time because it just works.
I tried the local voice assistant on my Sonos a while back and did like how well it worked to play music but at the time it didn’t support Spotify so it was a no-go. Do they now?
Do you know whether it supports locations and timers? For example I can tell Alexa “Play Eminem in the Family Room for one hour”
Can confirm timer works - set a 5 minute timer for playing music in the family room).
Spotify does work with Sonos now (I don’t use it but I have my account set up with it), but voice control does not work with Spotify.
Thanks. Sorry for being unclear: I use Spotify on my Sonos speakers all the time but was concerned about Sonos Voice working with Spotify. I guess it’s still a “no”
FYI- I received an email the other day that sonos officially added voice control for Spotify!
Excellent! Thanks for posting: I’ll have to give it a try
