The little smart home platform that could
The little smart home platform that could
With a new ownership structure, Home Assistant is making its next big move
- Home Assistant is now part of the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit aiming to fight against surveillance capitalism and offer privacy, choice, and sustainability.
- The foundation will own and govern all Home Assistant entities, including the cloud, and has plans for new hardware and AI integration.
- Home Assistant aims to become a mainstream smart home option with a focus on privacy and user control, while also expanding partnerships and certifications.
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I've dabbled a little with it, but I really want something that's as easy to use & set up as the commercial offerings like Google Home and Amazon Echo. I want to have an interface where I can connect my light bulbs, and have little hockey pucks that will listen for a wake word and do what I ask of it, and play my music. I also want to be able to get under the covers and do something that solves an odd problem that might come up.
I'm very hopeful for the project and I do think it will get there eventually.
Ease of setup in exchange for google/amazon spies in your house and your data. Seems like a very bad deal to me.
It’s really not that hard to setup for a basic setup and after that it’s working problem free with all kinds of manufacturers devices, not just one brand.
"Ease of setup in exchange..." I think people tend to forget what "ease" is for others. This is nothing against you as I agree with your statement but I work a job where doctors can't figure out how to even unplug a keyboard.
We tend to associate just being on a social media platform and typing on a computer with tech literacy. Not saying you did this just using it as an example. I think ease comes with more than just setup it comes with dealing or having patience with that setup.
We use Home Assistant in our house but I also have Google Assistant and even with Home Assistant I still find there are many more things to troubleshoot that Google Assistant just doesn't give me problems with.
For example it updated and our Camera just stopped being viewable outright and the time and money it actually took to fix that and yes I said money because it had to do with our camera hardware and upgrade on Internet service. So not directly Home Assistant but indirectly to fix it we had to buy another camera. Where Google Assistant just works.
I don't see anything wrong with the users statement either. All kinds of FOSS apps and services offer ease of use setup and platforms. I am not sure Why Home Assistant couldn't be set up to do some easy to add integration as well or offer competing products against things like Google Assistant aside from cost and not being a hardware company.
If the idea is to be inclusive the being easy as an exchange is a reasonable request from an end user. We also forget people don't have the hardware or time to learn to self host. Some of us have day to day jobs that don't involve this kind of understanding as well as kids, etc. Ease of use as an exchange is why many platforms the Lemmy community doesn't understand are so popular and maybe open source platforms should adopt that mentality somewhat to bring more people in.
You can live in both worlds and want the other world to give you something another world might. However, don't get me wrong I don't disagree with you. Home Assistant isn't terribly difficult to learn but if I were to hand it to my parents I would be doing it for them. There is also a laziness to be said that can be attributed to people not wanting to learn to set up something like this but I don't believe that to be the same as entitlement as a consumer is entitled to want more from a product.
Anyways, I have said my bit and this isn't meant to be an argument just providing my perspective. I would argue we should stop nagging people about "easy isn't a good trade off." Easy is why so many services people hate on Lemmy are so popular and there is nothing wrong with ease. We should encourage easy in products we want more people to be a part of and companies to engage with users to make those products easier because in the end it makes Doctors life easier and easier for me to recommend to someone with no experience in the world of open source and self hosting. It also brings competition to the table and awareness can spread if something is easier to use and recommend. I wouldn't recommend Home Assistant to my girl friend as an example because what she does for a living is type in excel spreadsheets and word docs but I wouldn't expect her to deal with home assistant and that is not against her because she is absolutely intelligent and does all sorts of things with numbers I can't even as someone in IT who should be able to do so. She absolutely and 100% could figure it out but why would she when her life doesn't pertain or really care about things as such because those things aren't as open as something like Echo's platforms and Google Assistant which makes setup and access easy to use?
Privacy issues aside, for wider adoption the user experience needs to be better. Most people don't want to be a sysadmin for their house, they just want to live in it.
The problem is that commercial entities have the leverage to get hardware makers to design stuff for their environnement. It's the same issue Linux has vs. Windows. Mostly, it works great when you use things that conform to standards. But sometimes you'll hit an edge case. All in all, it's a small price to pay.
Sure, but if I had a Pi (or similar board) with a speaker and a mic, I'd hope to be able to do the same thing. A Pi Zero would definitely be able to do the job.
Hopefully, home assistant will get big enough that they will be impossible to ignore. With an estimated 1 million installs currently running worldwide, they're probably not there yet. At 5m though? Probably. 10m? Definitely.
They've mostly got the hardware right now and are developing more. A more mobile friendly and noob friendly unboarding process is really all they need.
They're working on a smart speaker. Says so in this very article.
Yeah, that's why I said I'm very hopeful. It says so in my comment.
Isn't that something like what this product is solving for? https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-S3-BOX-3
You can get your smart speaker and wake words with this. Integration with a voice recognition model and home assistant and you're golden.
I'll take a look at that, thanks. It's been a year or so since I last looked at it but back then there was a push button that you could use but I couldn't get it going.
Check out the FutureProofHomes youtube channel. He's developing a better presence/speaker puck, but the previous episodes get you something like an Alexa experience with voice assist. There's also a good thread in the HA forums about voice assist hardware ideas set up as a contest.
Thanks, I will definitely check out both of those