Dec 20, 2024 11 min read

The era of open voice

Welcome to the December edition of the Open Home Foundation newsletter, the place to learn about the latest and greatest things for your smart home that improve its privacy, choice, and sustainability.

The Open Home newsletter is written by Paulus Schoutsen - President of the Open Home Foundation and founder of Home Assistant. Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here!

Before we take a short break for the holidays, we have one last treat for the Open Home. One of the most significant announcements Home Assistant has made all year, and best of all, it will help you keep your New Year's resolution to swear off big tech in your home - our first voice assistant hardware. We also have a donation from an organization aligned with the Open Home mission, and a survey to help us build a more inclusive smart home.

Open voice assistant hardware

This week Home Assistant launched its first voice assistant hardware, Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition. As someone who has been using this daily, and whose family has also been using it extensively for the past couple months, it is truly an incredible piece of hardware.

I’ve been using Home Assistant’s voice control software Assist with a bunch of different third-party hardware over the years, and every one came with some massive compromise. In the end, none of this hardware was built for Home Assistant, nor were they really targeting them being used as a full-time voice assistant. Voice Preview Edition, on the other hand, was built from the ground up to work with Home Assistant, and was built to hear commands in tricky environments and look great while helping you control your home. It is the best open voice hardware on the market, hands down. I go into incredible detail about all the hardware here, along with my colleague Mike who does a deep dive into the software here.

Instead of going into all that again, I thought I’d delve into why we had to build this, why no one else has built something quite like this yet, and its critical importance to the Open Home that something like this exists.

Why Voice

In a world dominated by Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Amazon Alexa, their market control is absolute. We might break down every wall they put up around smart home devices and connect them to Home Assistant, but as long as we don’t have a voice assistant and complimentary hardware, they have something we don’t. I’m used to it being the other way around, where they lack the features of Home Assistant.

If you don’t like voice control, well there are tens of millions of people that might disagree with your stance, as it continues to be a top way people control their smart homes. Not having this feature excludes users, and it may even affect the accessibility of a smart home.

More than any other smart home technology, it remained the most exploitative. Time after time, big tech was found flaunting the rules, and sharing personal voice data with third parties. With no choice in the space, people just learned to live with the ever-present Big Brother listening to their lives. There were also small countries and languages that these voice assistants didn’t bother serving, as they were only interested in a return on investment.

What we did

Two years ago, we set out to change this by declaring 2023 the Year of the Voice. It was a call to action for the community, helping us choose areas to focus our collective intelligence and solve these problems. For a little background, there have been many open-source projects that have attempted to build this technology, but the barrier to entry is real. Big tech has devoted thousands of employees full-time to this work, and has years of voice data they “procured” from their customers.

During Year of the Voice, and also across 2024, we built many technologies from the ground up. We built Assist’s conversation engine that takes sentences and turns them into actions in Home Assistant. We also enlisted an army of Language Leaders to translate these sentences, and now have 25 languages that are ready-to-use (and more coming). We built Piper, our fast, local neural network-powered text-to-speech system that sounds great and can run on low-powered hardware. We built microWakeWord, a machine-learning driven wake word engine that does the processing on incredibly low-powered devices, providing faster responses. We also worked to integrate other organizations' technology into voice, including local speech-to-text, local LLMs, cloud AI, and cloud-based speech processing.

How the Open Home Foundation makes this possible

All of this work required top-level talent, using cutting-edge technologies and in some cases, serious compute. Small developers didn’t stand a chance, especially with most of big tech hoarding all their breakthroughs. This is something that can only be accomplished by an organization like the Open Home Foundation. We have the funding to hire talented people, pay for compute, and today build hardware - and when we make our software and research breakthroughs, we offer them to the world free and open-source.

Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition is the next step in opening up voice. Open hardware helps us set a standard for our Assist platform, and we want to bootstrap a thriving ecosystem of voice hardware. Voice Preview Edition sets the standard pretty high, with advanced audio processing that allows for better-quality audio, giving more accurate wake words and commands. Effort was also put into its design, making it small, unobtrusive, and premium-feeling, allowing it to fit into more homes. It’s also easier than any other voice assistant to get working with Home Assistant. All this adds up to hardware that people can use in their homes, allowing more people to try Assist and join in on its development.

We already have features other voice assistants don’t have - like functional AI home control or advanced timers. We have also started supporting languages the big players are ignoring. We had an early production run of Voice Preview Editions and shared them with our Language Leaders and other developers. With only a couple hundred in the wild, it’s already making a difference and has helped take a couple of languages across the line to “Fully supported” status.

The progress has been astounding, and I’m so thankful for everyone who has joined over the past couple of years. Year of the Voice started the ball rolling, but Voice Preview Edition will help it really build momentum. I’m excited to see what we build together!

DuckDuckGo donates to the Open Home Foundation

DuckDuckGo is best known for their privacy-focused search engine, but they’re much more than that, they provide a number of products that boost privacy on the internet, and they do so independently. They share the Open Home Foundation’s mission to bring privacy to the smart home, and this led them to make a donation to help the Foundation continue its work.

DuckDuckGo doesn't just support our work, every year they transparently fund multiple projects and organizations that support a better Internet ecosystem. Their mission is important and when you use their products, you support privacy on the internet - so now that you have a great Google free voice assistant, why not change your search engine while you’re at it!

TP-Link listens to Open Home community

Often, when we talk about companies and local APIs, we discuss when they make the wrong decision, either shutting them down or locking them away. So I am very happy to announce that this month, we have some good news! Users of TP-Link Tapo cameras can now enjoy their devices in Home Assistant via a local API.

Last year, the TP-Link Tapo camera custom integration maintained by JurajNyiri reported a security vulnerability to TP-Link, and some months later users started to report the integration stopped working 🤔. This maintainer tried multiple workarounds, and then eventually contacted TP-Link, communicating with them for months to find a solution, eventually TP-Link settled on adding a new toggle to allow Third-Party Compatibility with their cameras, and they specifically mention Home Assistant! Thanks JurajNyiri for your determination and TP-Link for working with him. If you’re interested in how to get started with this community integration, check it out here.

Community survey

For Home Assistant to build its roadmap, it needed to get serious about research, and the team started methodically scouring our community resources to learn their wants and needs. Now, we're really ramping up our research, and going forward we'll have an annual community survey.

First of all, the survey is completely anonymous, and you can skip any question you don't want to answer. There are some sensitive questions; for example, we ask about neurodiversity. This will help us understand how our community processes and interacts with information so that we can build a more inclusive platform.

It is not just about how and what you use Home Assistant for; it also explores the community's connection to the Open Home values and even their feelings about the Foundation. We want your thoughts, and it only takes about 20 minutes, but it could make a big difference. Please fill it out before the survey closes on January 20, 2025, and share it with everyone who uses your smart home.

The month of 'What the Heck?!' 2024

In case you missed it, this December is Home Assistant’s month of “What the heck?!” (WTH for short). Every two years, we take the time to pause, listen, and dive deep into the little things that maybe you go “What the heck?!” about Home Assistant.

Reporting bugs on GitHub can feel a bit tricky since it’s all about real issues and follows a set process. So, we’ve made it easier - check out our new Community Forum category to share your “What the heck?!” moments and vote on ideas. You only have until the end of December, and even if you don’t have anything on your mind, take a look and give some of them an upvote 👍.

Home Assistant 2024.12: Scene you in 2025!

The final Home Assistant release of 2024 is here, wrapping up an incredible year of features, milestones, and community growth. Highlights of this release include the improved scene editor, faster voice processing, and a revamped Integration Quality Scale for a better user experience. This release introduces a voice assistant that combines local processing with LLMs for faster and smarter commands.

Community highlights

In other news

Smart gadgets’ failure to commit to software support could be illegal, FTC warns. This would be a step in the right direction. Just having a brand be honest and say, “yeah, we’re done after 3 months”, would be refreshing. (Scharon Harding, ArsTechnica)
Apple’s ‘HomePod with a screen’ may come later in 2025. It will have an iPhone processor, RAM enough for AI, and an iPad mini screen… this has to cost a small fortune… well at least fans have time to start saving up. (Wes Davis, TheVerge)
NVIDIA Unveils Its Most Affordable Generative AI Supercomputer. This is the type of device I can imagine our community jumping at, we’ll see if it's the perfect little local AI box. (Chen Su, Nvidia Blog)
Your IKEA smart lights can now automatically adjust to match the time of day. A little late to the party on this one Ikea; this has been possible with Home Assistant for years, even with Ikea lights using a custom integration. (Lizzie Wilmot, T3)
Samsung’s ‘screens everywhere’ initiative for smart appliances. The Verge puts it best, “And they’ll undoubtedly be great places to display ads. Hooray!” (Thomas Ricker, TheVerge)
Dr Zwave and Silicon Labs go off-roading to test Z-Wave Long Range - very excited to see how people use Z-Wave long range in the home... or very far around the home. (Silicon Labs - Youtube)

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The era of open voice