Talking House

Science fiction movies have sold us on the idea of spaceships and homes we can talk to. In recent years, voice control at home has become possible thanks to the so-called "smart speakers" from Google, Amazon, and Apple. However, with these devices, almost all processing happens in the cloud, where your voice recordings are processed and translated into sentences and meaning.

Of course, this comes with drawbacks: You don't have any control over what happens with your voice recordings, posing a significant privacy risk. But, fundamentally, the problem lies even deeper. It makes no sense for your voice to travel through the Internet just to turn on a light in the same room where you are standing. Fortunately, offline voice control is feasible, even using only open source software. Nonetheless, voice processing is a complex and computationally intensive task, so you must be content with a limited scope, such as opening and closing blinds, turning lights on and off, asking for the time, or checking whether the door is closed.

Home Assistant [1] is an open source home automation project that puts local control and privacy first. You can use Home Assistant to control your devices without relying on cloud services. One of the areas where home automation has been difficult in the past is voice control. However, at the end of 2022, Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen declared 2023 "the year of voice," aiming to enable users to control their homes with voice commands in their native language using offline processing. This feature has now become quite usable, allowing you to control your home with a user-friendly voice assistant that respects your privacy and is made from open source software.

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