catculationCan you manage your house with a local, no-cloud voice assistant? Mostly, yes.
corrodedThe 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?
netburnrI 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:
- heat comes up 15 minutes before
- watch vibrates to wake me
- speaker plays music from Spotify for half an hour
- if I hear suddenly silence when the music stops it’s time to panic because I’m late