This is probably not the comment you were expecting: I truly applaud and respect how you deliver your conflict of interest disclaimer. You stop, make a point of it, and encourage people to go watch other reviews before forming their own opinion.
Great disclaimer at the beginning, a lot of people brush off any conflict of interest or say they’ll be unbiased despite the conflict. But encouraging people to look at other reviews too is the right move 👍
0:45 This ladies and gentleman, is called an moral integrity! Mad respect for any content creator that makes sure to be fully transparent and honest in the videos. Thank you.
I do wonder if this would let me pretend to be Seymour Skinner's mother.... "Seymour! The light is off!" Oh, and of course I would want the thing to reply back in Skinner's voice.
Okay, so i watched ALL the release review videos that were put out the other day and I can definitively say that yours was the best! You showed the latency for the local vs AI responses - most other reviewers did not, you showed the effectiveness of the microphones from various distances - other reviewers did not. It was really interesting to see how other reviewers formatted their videos and the things that they thought they should mention in their review. Yours was fully comprehensive and I feel to believe the best one that was put out the other day.
Thank you, appreciate that and glad you found it useful. I wanted to try and be as objective as possible (while sharing some of my own personal opinions) and showing the timings along with what it translated to in the real world was the best way I could think of 😅
Thanks for all you do Lewis. Ordered one from you even though it will take a little longer (US Shipping and all), but it's worth it to me to support those that support us! And let me pile on with my total respect for your disclaimer up front. Exactly what we have have come to expect from you. Integrity!
Great news! good job from the Nabucasa team. Like that we can use it as a high quality media player with the 3.5jack on my awsom stereo amplifier, in combination with Music Assist, this makes it a perfect solution. Bought it from your shop, love to support you. Now lets see what the future brings!
From what I've researched, the limitation is the current offerings of ESP32 chips, that cannot handle an Ethernet interface AND a mic/speaker. The UlimateSensor / Mini, is another such example, where the Mini version can do mic+speaker, but not Ethernet, and the standard version can do Ethernet, but not mic+speaker. Currently, you'd have to step up to some sort of RPi for this.
Almost, they can handle it, but the ESP32-S3 does not have a physical ethernet interface, only the ESP32 does (strangely) in the current family. The upcoming esp32-p4 has one also but not really out there yet and it doesn't have WiFi. It is possible to run ethernet on ESP32-S3 in another way though, we have a board on my desk right now that does. But the proper ethernet interface found on the ESP32 is best
I got one from you even though you're over the pond and you cost a tiny bit more and I'll wait longer for it. Thanks for the content and the great products you not only have brought to light to me, but also have designed and produced yourself!
You have no idea how happy I am to here this. I'm done with Alexa. And with the talk of Alexa features changing to a required subscription that may or may not get ride of some it's current functionality, this a perfect time for this device. I'm all-to-ready for this change.
Alexa, turn on kitchen light..."there's nothing named kitchen on Mike's account"...ALEXA! Turn on KITCHEN LIGHT..."I didnt find anything named clark on this account"...ALEXA TURN ON KITCHEN!!!!!!..."There is no device named kitchen on this account, did you mean kitchen light"? Alexa causing marital issues in my household, I'm excited for this!
@@KrispKiwi I don't care for all that, I need local voice control and thats it. I dont need my commands to got to the cloud, then come back into the home, then try to talk to my home assistant and fail miserably.
@@-Brunnen-G Thats what pisses me off, it worked pretty good a few years, every releases makes it worse. I also don't need alexa giving me a paragraph long ad after I just asked it what the temperature outside was. I believe amazon is purposely breaking it, specifically with connections like Home Assistant, forcing you to use their UI
Voice control is pivotal in my smart home and voice hardware and home assistant was always a hanging point for fully jumping in. This is something i will be watching very closely. I know alexa can be used. Merry Christmas Lewis. Thank you for all the great content this year.
Firstly wishing you a Merry Christmas. Thank you for all your hard work that has helped me to get a great Home Assistant setup. I have seen the year of the voice as laying the ground work. It needs a lot of effort to get the voice parts working well, and Paul Hibbert demonstrated this very well. Having had a week from hell with WiFi difficulties, the zigbee part has been rock solid and I must admit that I would love to be able to make more use with other products. I have just moved my installation from a Virtual Machine to a small form factor i5 PC running a bare metal install as I was intending to start setting up AI on home assistant, so this video is great timing. I love that even though you sell these, you still tell people to look elsewhere. I will definately buy more from you and support you.
Snapped one up straight away to help support you. My wife only really uses our echos for timers, and they're always asking if I want to add another new book by James Patterson to my basket, so I'll be very happy if this replaces them.
This is only going to get better. Ordered mine and can’t wait to test it out. I’m also happy to pay a premium for devices that prioritize local control and privacy.
i wish they would release a version that allows you to just replace the gusts in say a google mini., seeing as all the hardware is already there thats needed and have away better speaker.
I was thinking would be possible to 3d print a different lower housing for this and we could swap in a better speaker from a repurposed device that would be normally e-waste, like an iPod dock or a Google speaker....just don't know if the amplifier on board would be able to drive them.
There is a huge volume of orders we are working round the clock to process orders in the orders they were placed. It's also very unfortunate timing with it being Christmas season since last collection day has now past. Thanks for your patience, we are genuinely working as fast as we can.
@EverythingSmartHome I ordered mine at 2am on Friday morning, but still shows as unfulfilled so would think I was one of the first to orders to be dispatched. Should I send an email or just be patient?
I totally understand it may seem like you were one of the first since it had only been 5-6 hours it was out for but there was more than 1200 orders before yours at that point 😅 we've packed a lot today and not long finished up
The combination of local and cloud processing sounds promising. I'm particularly interested in how well it integrates with other Home Assistant features and how the LLM support will improve over time.
This is actually a game changer for HA. I'll be watching this closely. I'd love to overhaul my smart speaker setup and this is the frontrunner contender if development continues to improve like this!
Just ordered one from your shop. I’m pretty much a HA newbie but I’m trying to set up our bedroom so everything runs locally, and this will be a great addition.
Fantastic news! I think the price is reasonable for the hardware, given what it can do, how it does it, and how well it should integrate with HA. I assume that being an ESPHome device it supports bluetooth proxy? This is very usable hardware considering in some ways it's technically a dev board. I hope that it becomes possible to setup your own custom wakeword in the future, and maybe a way to control the LED ring to use it for other notifications. A great first step, I'll probably buy several
It would be amazing to have a pcb with all this features that can be installed in Google Home pod. It has a good speaker and would reduce e-waste. Thanks for this test video
Great timing. I've had your store open in a tab for a week now as have been meaning to buy another couple of your mmwave sensors. So this just prodded me to order them, along with the voice-pe. :D
@EverythingSmartHome I will thanks. Just ordered a pi5 and Poe board too, so my whole setup is getting a big upgrade. Setup a local ollama llm last month that works nicely. Will be able to get rid of the Google homes soon maybe. ;)
This looks like a great step forward. I am going to wait until a unit with an updated high quality speaker is released. That will be the game-changer for me.
I ordered mine on Friday morning (UK time). I am holding out hope that it might get here before Xmas but I know that’s a long shot! I had planned on watching the release live stream on Thursday night but felt rubbish so I went to bed early, as soon as I woke up I put my order in. I originally bought my HA Green from EST, now my VoicePE, I’ll be back in the new year for some ESP too. I am 100% aware that the VoicePE is not perfect, but I am excited to tinker and see what it can do. Hopefully the combined efforts of the HA community can improve the hardware and software to make the next iteration of the HA Voice a really solid bit of kit.
This looks absolutely superb, and very much appreciate the open and honest disclaimer at the start (and indeed continued throughout). As someone relatively new to HA, I’m wondering how this could be implemented across a whole house. It seems a bit redundant to have to buy one of these for every room. Is there a more centralized solution that could be deployed that uses existing whole home audio and additional microphones to pick up the commands?
I love the Scottish lilt in the responses, so much easier to understand than those American accents. I didn’t realise such choice was possible. Now I’m feeling nostalgic about Hogmanay and whiskey and a light dusting on snow.
This is amazing. I watched the live stream and was blown away with this device. You have my order Lewis. Can't wait to get my hands on a couple of these. Couple of questions, was that voice you used built in? I detected a lovely Scots accent from her 😁. Secondly, are we able to customise the sound of the wake word response? For example, if I say "Hey Jarvis", rather than just playing a sound can I get it to say "Yes Dave, how can I help?". That would be super cool.
Thanks! It's the Alba voice that's in piper, gotta represent Scotland 😂 I saw a video of that exact thing earlier today, it's not built in natively just yet but must be possible somehow
Preliminary Edition is sold out as of 12/26/24 but I’d have waited for v1.1 anyway. VERY good news. The lack of a locally hosted voice control is one reason I’ve been following but not using Home Assistant. But it looks like I’ll be starting in 2025. Very reasonable price by the way.
If you need an idea for a new video, getting one of the new NVidia Jetson Orin Nano Super mini computers with Cuda cores to run HA and Ollama against and then testing the local hardware with local AI would be something to see....
Running whisper and Piper on an Nvidia Jetson. Honestly the new 250 nano 8GB dev board, which is just an Orin NX 8GB without a case, can run whisper, piper and llama 3.2 LLM fine. Nvidia worked with HA to port everything, you can even run HA Core on the Jetson with add ons but I didn't go that route I was interested in times so turning on debug mode.when running on the Jetson the natural language time was 0.01with Gwen 2.5 sand the speech-to-text were 0.39s. I'm running tiny-int8, now I need to try another model after seeing this but honestly I don't see how that's going to make a difference with the response times I had
Very random or off topic question, but what kind of fireplace is that in the background of most of the video? Nicely done information and disclaimer about the conflict of interest. I especially appreciated the comparison of the time to process voice prompts through the different methods.
needs a better speaker! WAY BETTER speaker! I know there is a board that can go into the google nest but i would like a large production of that board for internals of a google nest
This, Google Nest basically gets you cheap multiroom audio "with voice assistant as bonus". Properly automated houses don't need much voice input. (but when you use it, it needs to be properly good..). This is definitely a step in the right direction, but speaker needs to be better.
@@kiplinght It's important to have one per room, so you can identify which lights to turn on or off with a simple command of: "turn on the lights". Similar to what Alexa does.
got mine immediately! got a ep lite while I was at it.. got 2 EP1's already and they are awesome too! I suspect Lewis got blasted with orders within the first 10 mins.. lol
Definitely picking up multiple of these from you guys, and one of the new Nvidia Jetson units from Nvidia for 250 usd so I can run Ollama on that - well, at the start of the incoming year. Hey, see if you can add the Jetson dev kit to your product lineup and I'll buy that off you too.
This is fantastic! I will Google it later but I wonder if you can use this with other languages (Swedish) and if anyone used it to add things to a list? Keep up the great work! ❤️🎄🎅 Edit: wrote too soon 😅 I see now you addressed languages later in the video.
I hope they can design a v2 of the hardware with a more bland visual style and some accessories to hang it on a wall (from the power outlet). I think Google' was able to achieve one of the best looking devices with their Nest Mini, having minimal flashiness and still enough user feedback. The fabric on the Mini has a look that fits well enough with most decor including rustic and modern.
MyCroft did a very similar open-hardware project with a Raspberry Pi 4 instead of an ESP-32. It had an XMOS audio processor as well, and I always thought it was the best hardware we could get at this time. Unfortunately, they ran out of money before it could establish itself on the market. Good to see that HA keeps the legacy alive. I'll probably get one to try and see if I can get it working with SEPIA as well 🙂
This is cool and my mind is already bustling with ideas on making a nice quality speaker base for it with inspiration from DIYperks recent 3d printed surround sound speaker enclosures (but scaled down because it's just a smart speaker 😅)
Ill mention that since this has the 3.5 jack, there are tons of cheap clone broadlink IR blasters that work terrific in HA, so you can repurpose all that supeior sounding but "dumb" audio equipment you have lying around, or can find cheap as heck out there. I have a 90s era technics mini bookshelf system with proper wooden cabinet, bi ampped speakers, with a proper amplifer section and not just an op-amp, as my "smart speaker" in ny office, using a google nest as the interface, chromecast audio, an ir blaster and HA handling a few routines. Since the CCA is hard to get these days this would fit the bill nicely.
Couple of questions as you never covered them. Are the units “room aware”. So for example if I’m in the kitchen and ask the kitchen device to turn off the lights, does it know to only turn off the kitchen lights. I do this with Alexa today, but I had to write code to do it using Amazon API’s which are not 100% supported. The second question was about outputting through an associated speaker rather than a physically connected one. I use Sonos today and do all my tts through the device relevant to the room I’m in, again Alexa knows about this as well, so rather than playing the responses through the rather tinny speaker, and not wanting to drape audio cables around in my wireless speaker setup, can the responses be directed to an existing media playback device instead?
Yes, sorry never dawned on me to cover room aware as it's been a feature in voice for a long time now - but yes you can say turn off the lights and it will do the room you are in (as long as you have areas setup correctly in HA) It is possible to do announcements on different speakers yes but I haven't yet looked into it myself
Just ordered the Home Assistant preview. Can’t wait to get it and try it out. One thing I am not certain of. Doesn’t come with power cable and power brick? I don’t have extras lying around so would like to get that ordered too if needed. Thanks. 🙂
It might be worthwhile revisiting the tutorial (or linking it if already done) and combining it with web access and / or local hosted LLM so we can get more context answers rather than just controlling devices.
I like how we are getting closer to a Jarvis. How far away do you think we are from having an off the shelf product with voice, mic and camera I can place in ever room, linking to a local LLM and home assistant. I want enough intelligence there to hold a conversation, control my devices and watch over my elderly parents. Would we great if it could tell me my mum with dementia was going out of the front door or warn my dad with poor eyesight that he was about to trip over something.
Is it possible to disable or reduce the confirmations that it reads out (the, "ok ove turned the lights in the kitchen on" response) this is a big complaint that I have with Google devices, the confirmation is loud and long. Sometimes longer than the original ask. Which is annoying when, e.g., baby is sleeping, etc.
It's great that it has a 3.5mm audio socket. We currently have a Chromecast Audio plugged into a tiny Adafruit class D amp PCB, to a couple of decent speakers... If that fails I'll be replacing it with one of these
Would prefer if it was a bit cheaper... right now it competes with nest mini for me which can be had often for less. I realise Google/Amazon also got your data but that's the market right now... $40 would be acceptable I guess. If the format remains as the product matures, it will be nice to create some speaker docks for it. I also wonder if it's possible to choose to route voice via the internal speaker while connected to an external speaker. Essentially keeping the external dock speakers off unless something like music is playing. One question I have, is there any way to connect a Google Coral to HA (on a rpi or x86) to make the local inference much faster?
I'm not waiting around this time. I'm just going to order one and jump in head first. Even if the voice implementation is a bit basic for now, it's still a really fancy powered notification light and multi button.
What i want to see as voice choices in the future, is something google and apple has neglected for a decade, or over a decade? And that's a scottish speaker for the voice assistant. So i really hope we can get scottish as an option in the future!
I’m sure it’s great IF you have Home Assistant Cloud and the ability to use Add Ons. But I have neither (running in Docker) and have spent hours trying to get mine to work! No progress so far. So now I have a couple of expensive plastic boxes!!
Can a voice command playback audio from a LOCAL music server (or SMB share?) and direct the audio to a HomePod or something along those lines? Seems like Apple and Amazon products all seem to depend on paid music subscriptions, and I don't play their game. I have a large local library I would love to pull from easier. This product seems like the answer I've been looking for, as I don't trust cloud-connected hot mikes, so I always disable any such thing from Google, Apple, etc., and only use the manual button to trigger a listen. Something like this, I could actually be comfortable "listening" all the time!
9:40 I've tested local llama LLM on a ryzen processor and it was extremely slow, like 30 seconds to turn off lights. However, if I did not expose any entities and just use it as chat bot, then it's more or less immediate. But that's useless.
Is it possible that a connected speaker to the 3,5mm jack can output the spoken feedback/ reply’s? To bypass the (imho a bit lackluster) built in speaker. Or maybe reroute all audio to a media.player? Thanks in advance for a reply!
Since it says its a "Preview", will there be changes to hardware in nearby future updates? Debating if I should wait a bit or not. Thanks for an awesome walkthrough!
One feature that Alexa has is that if you have multiple Alexa devices it will figure out that multiple devices heard the wake work and cancel the activation on all but one of them. Can the PE do something like this?
This is probably not the comment you were expecting: I truly applaud and respect how you deliver your conflict of interest disclaimer. You stop, make a point of it, and encourage people to go watch other reviews before forming their own opinion.
Thank you, nothing is worth sacrificing my audiences trust for, of which I'm extremely aware of how lucky I am to have
boss
Great disclaimer at the beginning, a lot of people brush off any conflict of interest or say they’ll be unbiased despite the conflict. But encouraging people to look at other reviews too is the right move 👍
Of course he is biased...!
0:45 This ladies and gentleman, is called an moral integrity! Mad respect for any content creator that makes sure to be fully transparent and honest in the videos. Thank you.
Transparency always 🫡
I would only use this so I can say “Aziz! Light!. Thank you Aziz.”
"Aziz, more light"
I do wonder if this would let me pretend to be Seymour Skinner's mother....
"Seymour! The light is off!"
Oh, and of course I would want the thing to reply back in Skinner's voice.
You win the internet today!
lol, well now I know what I'm watching tomorrow night.
I have been wanting to do this for a long time.
Okay, so i watched ALL the release review videos that were put out the other day and I can definitively say that yours was the best! You showed the latency for the local vs AI responses - most other reviewers did not, you showed the effectiveness of the microphones from various distances - other reviewers did not. It was really interesting to see how other reviewers formatted their videos and the things that they thought they should mention in their review. Yours was fully comprehensive and I feel to believe the best one that was put out the other day.
Thank you, appreciate that and glad you found it useful. I wanted to try and be as objective as possible (while sharing some of my own personal opinions) and showing the timings along with what it translated to in the real world was the best way I could think of 😅
It’s amazing that they were able to find surplus wheels from the OG iPod.
Shut up and take my money....oh, wait you just did. 😆🤣 Happy Christmas!
Thanks for all you do Lewis. Ordered one from you even though it will take a little longer (US Shipping and all), but it's worth it to me to support those that support us!
And let me pile on with my total respect for your disclaimer up front. Exactly what we have have come to expect from you. Integrity!
Appreciate the support, thank you 🙏🏻🙏🏻
Great news! good job from the Nabucasa team. Like that we can use it as a high quality media player with the 3.5jack on my awsom stereo amplifier, in combination with Music Assist, this makes it a perfect solution. Bought it from your shop, love to support you. Now lets see what the future brings!
Enjoy when it arrives 🙏🏻
Would love all of these types of devices to be powered by POE, with the adoption to use the lan, rather than wifi.
From what I've researched, the limitation is the current offerings of ESP32 chips, that cannot handle an Ethernet interface AND a mic/speaker.
The UlimateSensor / Mini, is another such example, where the Mini version can do mic+speaker, but not Ethernet, and the standard version can do Ethernet, but not mic+speaker.
Currently, you'd have to step up to some sort of RPi for this.
This. Omg this.
Almost, they can handle it, but the ESP32-S3 does not have a physical ethernet interface, only the ESP32 does (strangely) in the current family. The upcoming esp32-p4 has one also but not really out there yet and it doesn't have WiFi.
It is possible to run ethernet on ESP32-S3 in another way though, we have a board on my desk right now that does. But the proper ethernet interface found on the ESP32 is best
@@EverythingSmartHome let's see the first PoE powered/connected "Everything Sensor" with full IAQ suite of sensors, mmWave, and with mic+speaker!
I love that your Home Assistant has a Scottish accent! Now I’m all home sick. LOL. Order placed. Can’t wait. Thanks Lewis!
Gotta represent 😂
I got one from you even though you're over the pond and you cost a tiny bit more and I'll wait longer for it.
Thanks for the content and the great products you not only have brought to light to me, but also have designed and produced yourself!
Thanks so much for supporting!
You have no idea how happy I am to here this. I'm done with Alexa. And with the talk of Alexa features changing to a required subscription that may or may not get ride of some it's current functionality, this a perfect time for this device. I'm all-to-ready for this change.
Alexa, turn on kitchen light..."there's nothing named kitchen on Mike's account"...ALEXA! Turn on KITCHEN LIGHT..."I didnt find anything named clark on this account"...ALEXA TURN ON KITCHEN!!!!!!..."There is no device named kitchen on this account, did you mean kitchen light"?
Alexa causing marital issues in my household, I'm excited for this!
@@dvrtimemachine I swear, it seems Alexa gets dumber just before another new Echo device release, huh.
@@dvrtimemachine Why is this needed though? No MMwave or Pir?
@@KrispKiwi I don't care for all that, I need local voice control and thats it. I dont need my commands to got to the cloud, then come back into the home, then try to talk to my home assistant and fail miserably.
@@-Brunnen-G Thats what pisses me off, it worked pretty good a few years, every releases makes it worse.
I also don't need alexa giving me a paragraph long ad after I just asked it what the temperature outside was.
I believe amazon is purposely breaking it, specifically with connections like Home Assistant, forcing you to use their UI
Voice control is pivotal in my smart home and voice hardware and home assistant was always a hanging point for fully jumping in. This is something i will be watching very closely. I know alexa can be used.
Merry Christmas Lewis. Thank you for all the great content this year.
Firstly wishing you a Merry Christmas. Thank you for all your hard work that has helped me to get a great Home Assistant setup.
I have seen the year of the voice as laying the ground work. It needs a lot of effort to get the voice parts working well, and Paul Hibbert demonstrated this very well.
Having had a week from hell with WiFi difficulties, the zigbee part has been rock solid and I must admit that I would love to be able to make more use with other products. I have just moved my installation from a Virtual Machine to a small form factor i5 PC running a bare metal install as I was intending to start setting up AI on home assistant, so this video is great timing.
I love that even though you sell these, you still tell people to look elsewhere. I will definately buy more from you and support you.
1:32 👏👏👏 - Your transparency right off the bat increases my confidence in your honest judgement. Thank you. 🙏 - Now let’s get started 😜
Of course! 🙏🏻
Just bought 2 of these to test out 🎉 Recently picked up 3 EPL's and I love them!
Love to hear that 🙏🏻
Snapped one up straight away to help support you. My wife only really uses our echos for timers, and they're always asking if I want to add another new book by James Patterson to my basket, so I'll be very happy if this replaces them.
This is only going to get better. Ordered mine and can’t wait to test it out. I’m also happy to pay a premium for devices that prioritize local control and privacy.
Enjoy when it arrives buddy!
i wish they would release a version that allows you to just replace the gusts in say a google mini., seeing as all the hardware is already there thats needed and have away better speaker.
I was thinking would be possible to 3d print a different lower housing for this and we could swap in a better speaker from a repurposed device that would be normally e-waste, like an iPod dock or a Google speaker....just don't know if the amplifier on board would be able to drive them.
Check out the Onju voice if you want something more DIY like that, it does just that
Ordered within the first few minutes of watching, to try and beat the rush. They were still in stock about 45 minutes after the video's release 😂
I got mine today, works great so far. Thanks for getting them out so quickly :)
Haven’t even received a tracking number for mine from his store…
There is a huge volume of orders we are working round the clock to process orders in the orders they were placed. It's also very unfortunate timing with it being Christmas season since last collection day has now past. Thanks for your patience, we are genuinely working as fast as we can.
@EverythingSmartHome I ordered mine at 2am on Friday morning, but still shows as unfulfilled so would think I was one of the first to orders to be dispatched. Should I send an email or just be patient?
I totally understand it may seem like you were one of the first since it had only been 5-6 hours it was out for but there was more than 1200 orders before yours at that point 😅 we've packed a lot today and not long finished up
@EverythingSmartHome oh wow. Congratulations on that then and I appreciate you replying when busy. Looking forward to using them!
The combination of local and cloud processing sounds promising. I'm particularly interested in how well it integrates with other Home Assistant features and how the LLM support will improve over time.
got mine yesterady, thanks for the prompt delivery
Literally bought this for Christmas as I watched this 😂 had to go with a different distributor cu you sold out! Haha
Quite interested in this one! Might actually ask to get this as a late Christmas gift!
This is actually a game changer for HA. I'll be watching this closely. I'd love to overhaul my smart speaker setup and this is the frontrunner contender if development continues to improve like this!
Immediately bought. So excited
Just ordered one from your shop. I’m pretty much a HA newbie but I’m trying to set up our bedroom so everything runs locally, and this will be a great addition.
Awesome, enjoy!
really cool progress. I appreciate your honest review
thanks for letting me know that your connected to the company :)
Fantastic news! I think the price is reasonable for the hardware, given what it can do, how it does it, and how well it should integrate with HA.
I assume that being an ESPHome device it supports bluetooth proxy?
This is very usable hardware considering in some ways it's technically a dev board.
I hope that it becomes possible to setup your own custom wakeword in the future, and maybe a way to control the LED ring to use it for other notifications.
A great first step, I'll probably buy several
It would be amazing to have a pcb with all this features that can be installed in Google Home pod. It has a good speaker and would reduce e-waste. Thanks for this test video
Great timing. I've had your store open in a tab for a week now as have been meaning to buy another couple of your mmwave sensors. So this just prodded me to order them, along with the voice-pe. :D
Awesome, enjoy when they arrive!
@EverythingSmartHome I will thanks. Just ordered a pi5 and Poe board too, so my whole setup is getting a big upgrade. Setup a local ollama llm last month that works nicely. Will be able to get rid of the Google homes soon maybe. ;)
This looks like a great step forward. I am going to wait until a unit with an updated high quality speaker is released. That will be the game-changer for me.
Just bought one too. Best Christmas present to myself 🎉
LOL. Sold out in less than a day. I did get an order in from the Chinese distributor earlier today.
I don't think I've ever been so quick to put in an order!
So weird that I was wanting something like that HA friendly voice, kudos!
I have everything running on a yellow so this may be a stretch but let's see. Excited to find out!
I ordered mine on Friday morning (UK time). I am holding out hope that it might get here before Xmas but I know that’s a long shot!
I had planned on watching the release live stream on Thursday night but felt rubbish so I went to bed early, as soon as I woke up I put my order in. I originally bought my HA Green from EST, now my VoicePE, I’ll be back in the new year for some ESP too.
I am 100% aware that the VoicePE is not perfect, but I am excited to tinker and see what it can do. Hopefully the combined efforts of the HA community can improve the hardware and software to make the next iteration of the HA Voice a really solid bit of kit.
Bought one via you. Buzzing to play around with this!! Thanks for the video
Cant wait to have a play with this over the break. Merry Xmas
Merry Christmas 🎄🎁
Just ordered, can't wait to see what I can do with this.
Now this is really cool! Thanks for the video Lewis.
Thank you Jamie, hope you are well!
Buying from you with international shipping to the US is a great value when buying 10!
Thanks for the review. The language part was important for me. Checking out the German coverage now :)
This looks great and I think the price is reasonable. Ordered.
This looks absolutely superb, and very much appreciate the open and honest disclaimer at the start (and indeed continued throughout).
As someone relatively new to HA, I’m wondering how this could be implemented across a whole house.
It seems a bit redundant to have to buy one of these for every room. Is there a more centralized solution that could be deployed that uses existing whole home audio and additional microphones to pick up the commands?
A Scottish accent, I'm sold, might have to treat myself. Cheers Lewis
I love the Scottish lilt in the responses, so much easier to understand than those American accents. I didn’t realise such choice was possible. Now I’m feeling nostalgic about Hogmanay and whiskey and a light dusting on snow.
Can't wait to get mine
This is amazing. I watched the live stream and was blown away with this device. You have my order Lewis. Can't wait to get my hands on a couple of these. Couple of questions, was that voice you used built in? I detected a lovely Scots accent from her 😁. Secondly, are we able to customise the sound of the wake word response? For example, if I say "Hey Jarvis", rather than just playing a sound can I get it to say "Yes Dave, how can I help?". That would be super cool.
Thanks!
It's the Alba voice that's in piper, gotta represent Scotland 😂
I saw a video of that exact thing earlier today, it's not built in natively just yet but must be possible somehow
Preliminary Edition is sold out as of 12/26/24 but I’d have waited for v1.1 anyway. VERY good news. The lack of a locally hosted voice control is one reason I’ve been following but not using Home Assistant. But it looks like I’ll be starting in 2025. Very reasonable price by the way.
If you need an idea for a new video, getting one of the new NVidia Jetson Orin Nano Super mini computers with Cuda cores to run HA and Ollama against and then testing the local hardware with local AI would be something to see....
Running whisper and Piper on an Nvidia Jetson. Honestly the new 250 nano 8GB dev board, which is just an Orin NX 8GB without a case, can run whisper, piper and llama 3.2 LLM fine. Nvidia worked with HA to port everything, you can even run HA Core on the Jetson with add ons but I didn't go that route
I was interested in times so turning on debug mode.when running on the Jetson the natural language time was 0.01with Gwen 2.5 sand the speech-to-text were 0.39s.
I'm running tiny-int8, now I need to try another model after seeing this but honestly I don't see how that's going to make a difference with the response times I had
Very random or off topic question, but what kind of fireplace is that in the background of most of the video?
Nicely done information and disclaimer about the conflict of interest. I especially appreciated the comparison of the time to process voice prompts through the different methods.
Came into the comments to ask the same thing! What fireplace is that!?
needs a better speaker! WAY BETTER speaker! I know there is a board that can go into the google nest but i would like a large production of that board for internals of a google nest
This, Google Nest basically gets you cheap multiroom audio "with voice assistant as bonus". Properly automated houses don't need much voice input. (but when you use it, it needs to be properly good..). This is definitely a step in the right direction, but speaker needs to be better.
Could you make a video where you set all these options up for the LLM's if possible.
I need one similar to this for every room in the house, but in a smaller size, without buttons and to be embedded in the plaster ceiling.
Somebody should make one of these with a tonne of 3.5mm jacks on the back to connect wired microphones in different rooms
@@kiplinght It's important to have one per room, so you can identify which lights to turn on or off with a simple command of: "turn on the lights". Similar to what Alexa does.
got mine immediately! got a ep lite while I was at it.. got 2 EP1's already and they are awesome too! I suspect Lewis got blasted with orders within the first 10 mins.. lol
Haha indeed! I'm glad we ordered as many voices as we did now 😅
Definitely picking up multiple of these from you guys, and one of the new Nvidia Jetson units from Nvidia for 250 usd so I can run Ollama on that - well, at the start of the incoming year. Hey, see if you can add the Jetson dev kit to your product lineup and I'll buy that off you too.
This is fantastic! I will Google it later but I wonder if you can use this with other languages (Swedish) and if anyone used it to add things to a list?
Keep up the great work! ❤️🎄🎅
Edit: wrote too soon 😅 I see now you addressed languages later in the video.
I hope they can design a v2 of the hardware with a more bland visual style and some accessories to hang it on a wall (from the power outlet).
I think Google' was able to achieve one of the best looking devices with their Nest Mini, having minimal flashiness and still enough user feedback. The fabric on the Mini has a look that fits well enough with most decor including rustic and modern.
How fast are you 😅😂, thanks heaps, my products landed before XMas.
Buying a Voice box in 3.6 min 😅😂
MyCroft did a very similar open-hardware project with a Raspberry Pi 4 instead of an ESP-32. It had an XMOS audio processor as well, and I always thought it was the best hardware we could get at this time. Unfortunately, they ran out of money before it could establish itself on the market.
Good to see that HA keeps the legacy alive. I'll probably get one to try and see if I can get it working with SEPIA as well 🙂
This is cool and my mind is already bustling with ideas on making a nice quality speaker base for it with inspiration from DIYperks recent 3d printed surround sound speaker enclosures (but scaled down because it's just a smart speaker 😅)
Ill mention that since this has the 3.5 jack, there are tons of cheap clone broadlink IR blasters that work terrific in HA, so you can repurpose all that supeior sounding but "dumb" audio equipment you have lying around, or can find cheap as heck out there.
I have a 90s era technics mini bookshelf system with proper wooden cabinet, bi ampped speakers, with a proper amplifer section and not just an op-amp, as my "smart speaker" in ny office, using a google nest as the interface, chromecast audio, an ir blaster and HA handling a few routines.
Since the CCA is hard to get these days this would fit the bill nicely.
Can we ever expect one of your 'everything presence' devices to support voice? That would be my preference 😊
I'd really like to see a comparison video between this and the S3 Box. What are the pros and cons of each?
I wish they sold pcb replacements for google home or alexa; a guy did a prototype a few years ago and it looked and sounded amazing
Couple of questions as you never covered them. Are the units “room aware”. So for example if I’m in the kitchen and ask the kitchen device to turn off the lights, does it know to only turn off the kitchen lights. I do this with Alexa today, but I had to write code to do it using Amazon API’s which are not 100% supported. The second question was about outputting through an associated speaker rather than a physically connected one. I use Sonos today and do all my tts through the device relevant to the room I’m in, again Alexa knows about this as well, so rather than playing the responses through the rather tinny speaker, and not wanting to drape audio cables around in my wireless speaker setup, can the responses be directed to an existing media playback device instead?
Yes, sorry never dawned on me to cover room aware as it's been a feature in voice for a long time now - but yes you can say turn off the lights and it will do the room you are in (as long as you have areas setup correctly in HA)
It is possible to do announcements on different speakers yes but I haven't yet looked into it myself
Just ordered the Home Assistant preview. Can’t wait to get it and try it out. One thing I am not certain of. Doesn’t come with power cable and power brick? I don’t have extras lying around so would like to get that ordered too if needed. Thanks. 🙂
It might be worthwhile revisiting the tutorial (or linking it if already done) and combining it with web access and / or local hosted LLM so we can get more context answers rather than just controlling devices.
I like how we are getting closer to a Jarvis. How far away do you think we are from having an off the shelf product with voice, mic and camera I can place in ever room, linking to a local LLM and home assistant.
I want enough intelligence there to hold a conversation, control my devices and watch over my elderly parents. Would we great if it could tell me my mum with dementia was going out of the front door or warn my dad with poor eyesight that he was about to trip over something.
Great video! Is it possible to reroute the audio output to another device, such as a Sonos speaker, within Home Assistant?
Is it possible to disable or reduce the confirmations that it reads out (the, "ok ove turned the lights in the kitchen on" response) this is a big complaint that I have with Google devices, the confirmation is loud and long. Sometimes longer than the original ask. Which is annoying when, e.g., baby is sleeping, etc.
you can disable the confirmation if you want. Also as far as I know, you can set custom answers.
It's great that it has a 3.5mm audio socket. We currently have a Chromecast Audio plugged into a tiny Adafruit class D amp PCB, to a couple of decent speakers... If that fails I'll be replacing it with one of these
Easter eggs are so much easier to find when a product is open source...
Trust me :D
Did you find the one on the Voice PE website?
Would prefer if it was a bit cheaper... right now it competes with nest mini for me which can be had often for less. I realise Google/Amazon also got your data but that's the market right now... $40 would be acceptable I guess.
If the format remains as the product matures, it will be nice to create some speaker docks for it.
I also wonder if it's possible to choose to route voice via the internal speaker while connected to an external speaker.
Essentially keeping the external dock speakers off unless something like music is playing.
One question I have, is there any way to connect a Google Coral to HA (on a rpi or x86) to make the local inference much faster?
For those who managed to get stock from your store - when are you dispatching the orders?
I'm not waiting around this time. I'm just going to order one and jump in head first. Even if the voice implementation is a bit basic for now, it's still a really fancy powered notification light and multi button.
Enjoy when it arrives!
What i want to see as voice choices in the future, is something google and apple has neglected for a decade, or over a decade? And that's a scottish speaker for the voice assistant. So i really hope we can get scottish as an option in the future!
Didn't even watch the video before ordering from your store :D
Thank you 🙏🏻
Is it possible to play music via speakers connected to the 3.5mm jack while using the internal speaker for voice command replies?
Yes, you can, in the demo today they did that
I have Local LLM setup on my server that uses rtx 3060, I use mistral-nemo 13b. works like a charm.
I’m sure it’s great IF you have Home Assistant Cloud and the ability to use Add Ons. But I have neither (running in Docker) and have spent hours trying to get mine to work! No progress so far. So now I have a couple of expensive plastic boxes!!
I missed out on your website to buy when would you be restocking this again
Can a voice command playback audio from a LOCAL music server (or SMB share?) and direct the audio to a HomePod or something along those lines? Seems like Apple and Amazon products all seem to depend on paid music subscriptions, and I don't play their game. I have a large local library I would love to pull from easier.
This product seems like the answer I've been looking for, as I don't trust cloud-connected hot mikes, so I always disable any such thing from Google, Apple, etc., and only use the manual button to trigger a listen. Something like this, I could actually be comfortable "listening" all the time!
9:40 I've tested local llama LLM on a ryzen processor and it was extremely slow, like 30 seconds to turn off lights. However, if I did not expose any entities and just use it as chat bot, then it's more or less immediate. But that's useless.
The hardware looks promising but I hope it’s possible to do on sonos hardware one day
will there be support for a custom wake word on the device?
You mention the music limitations at present with Spotify etc. anyone know how it performs with Music Assistant Addon with local music ?
Do you ship to South africa
I will be picking one up as soon as I can find someone who is not out of stock. 😂
Is it possible that a connected speaker to the 3,5mm jack can output the spoken feedback/ reply’s?
To bypass the (imho a bit lackluster) built in speaker.
Or maybe reroute all audio to a media.player?
Thanks in advance for a reply!
Since it says its a "Preview", will there be changes to hardware in nearby future updates? Debating if I should wait a bit or not. Thanks for an awesome walkthrough!
One feature that Alexa has is that if you have multiple Alexa devices it will figure out that multiple devices heard the wake work and cancel the activation on all but one of them. Can the PE do something like this?
Can you create reminders on it?
I know it's not the point, but can it be used as a decibel meter ?