The era of open voice assistants has arrived

I'm so excited for this! I was able to make an order. Homeassistant is making such a difference here. I was a Mycroft supporter and it's so great that since they've gone away we've still got hardware in this space. This hardware makes so much sense too, I hope the voice train keeps rolling!

I followed mycroft for years. It was a bit of a mess. I was sad to see it kinda die.
- Same here :(

I wish I could repurpose my Home Minis to use this. Google butchered those entirely over time, so now they're practically collecting dust, when I dont use them as an occasional room speaker

Somebody else linked this mobo replacement for the home minis, haven't looked very closely at it yet myself: https://github.com/justLV/onju-voice

Ordered. I'm am so excited for this as it seems it could replace my only use case for Google Home / Nest voice.

No POE = Deal breaker for me

Although it's a very promising start. Looks great.

It's USB-C, there are POE adapters. It's low wattage using an esp32, you could absolutely use a USB c poe splitter for this.
- That solves only power, not Ethernet.
You could always use a POE splitter. I know it’s not the same but it’s better than yet another wall wort.
- Still no ethernet.
What's POE, precious?
- Power over Ethernet
It doesn't even have Ethernet, how could it have poe? Also poe is just stupidly expensive for what it is.
- Exactly. No Ethernet + no POE. That's my point. WiFi only is a big no-no for me.

Was anyone able to order one? I saw this last night and at 2 hours after post, all three us retailers were saying sold out. I suppose it’s a good problem for ha to have.

Edit: one of the retailers updated their message to “ we have sold out of our initial HA Voice stock in 21 minutes”

European retailers seem to be better stocked

Are there difference between this and a 13$ M5 Atom Echo?

Yes
- Point given for accuracy of response.
- Like...?
  Edit: I've bought the M5 some months ago but I haven't had the time to play around with it, should I buy this one and forget about the M5?
Yeah the mic and speaker on the atom are OK if you are within 2 feet, beyond that they aren't any good. This looks good
- Thanks
- I couldn't get mine to work properly at all. They're barely reacting to "okay nabu" and when they do they just misunderstand what I'm saying after the trigger words.

Neat! I hope we can add on a speaker, we use ours for playing audio

if you want to use it as a media player, connect a speaker to the included 3.5mm headphone jack and control it with software like Music Assistant.
- God idk how I missed that, but thank you
- It works well.
  I have done the same thing with custom hardware, ESPHome, and routed the output to my old Yamaha AV receiver with an IR blaster in the device for auto source switching and volume control.
  I can't wait for music assistant to integrate Spotify connect because right now you can only play saved playlist/albums or some recent music, no browsing.
  A media player component plus microphone plus voice assistant.

I look forward to getting my hands on one of these! Just need to work out where to put it in the house first.

And possibly waiting for a POE version. But that's a nit-pick.

Is it possible to test this out using a phone or PC? I really like the idea of local voice assist.

IIRC the home assistant android app has VA functionality built in.
Not sure if it works in the same way as this box though.
- One of the best parts of HA is the HomeKit bridge: any supported device is exposed to HomeKit ….. so if I’m using a personal device, my VA is Siri. Much smoother and more integrated than any of the app VAs. I have it configured to require a click, so it’s not always listening. However the rumors of the upcoming Apple smart home hub are mighty enticing, so we’ll see
  I stopped using Google Assistant years ago.
  Echo devices are pretty much in every room and a huge privacy issue. Also that’s my one integration with the biggest internet dependency. I don’t know if I can get rid of them, but I’d surely like to try
Mod Magic.

Is the whole stack open source or do we have to buy their hardware or license their software?

Their device does look very slick, but I'd like to hack my own system together!

It’s all OSS.
Even better - it's using ESPHome, which is part of the Home Assistant stack.
ESPHome works from a YAML config file, which ESPHome uses to build firmware images which can be installed OTA (or USB of you must)

Only 2.4GHz WiFi?

Why would it need 5GHz? At most it needs to do two audio streams, which aren't going to need lots of bandwidth
- Interference. Especially in apartment complexes, the 2.4Ghz band is busy, causing a lot of packet drops and random disconnects.

That pretty sweet. The previous open source voice control solution I'd seen (Mycroft?) was like 400 bucks per device.

Might have to grab a mini PC and replace some of this Alexa shit which gets progressively worse since they announced a premium version.

I just need shit to do what it's told, not try to sell me things.

Nice! Been holding off on HA voice stuff, waiting for a more plug and play solution, so I've been watching this pretty closely. Managed to get one ordered before they (presumably) go out of stock in the UK. Hoping it arrives soon so I can tinker during the break!

Man, I hope someone designs a dock for this with a better speaker for music!!!

I mean...kinda?