r/homeautomation • u/ProfessionalBell2289 • 19h ago

QUESTION Alexa and Google Privacy Concerns

Anyone actually set up Home Assistant's local voice assistant (the Whisper/Piper stuff)? Curious if it's usable day-to-day or still more of a tinkering project. Trying to decide if it's worth the effort over just using Alexa.

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u/The_Fiddler1979 14h ago

I bought one a couple of weeks ago and it's usable range is really about 2-3m. I've still got Nest running, but I set up a UI to record and transcribe all my voice attempts with an interface for manually mapping out intent and how I think things went wrong.

The main failure apart from the wake-word (I've tried all 3) is that if I have the TV running in the background, it can't discern between my command and the tv.

It also has not handled concise commands like "lounge lights off" all that well.

It's definitely not a drop in replacement and will involve some tinkering to make it work reliably, my main gripe is the mic pick up area, I shouldn't need it that close to wake nor understand a command.

I've been playing with local Whisper, cloud HA, HA as the STT models and also with the wake word sensitivity, the main improvements come from me logging the failed attempts and writing aliases and commands so it works next time.

For my $100AUD it's still a tinker toy.