Bea Beltran Tech 12.28.2022 04:Dec AM EST

Home Assstant Will Soon Function Without Alexa, Siri, or Google

Home Assistant, an open-source platform that is used as a central controller for smart home devices, will be getting its own voice assistant soon. It will be able to do basic tasks that smart home control can provide.

Home Assistant Functioning on Its Own

Home Assistant founder Paulus Schousten posted a blog that announced the news. The project allows for voice commands to be localized. This means that there will be no need for connecting to a cloud, which is required for voice assistants like Alexa and Siri.

Although, you shouldn't expect too much of the Home Assistant just yet. It's still in its early stages which means that it's not as smart as Alexa or Siri. As mentioned in The Verge, you can't make calls, do web searches, or do voice games yet.

What's unique about the new smart assistant is that it's open-source and there is a community backing it. There's also the option of programming your own actions, brought by command sentences being gathered in an "intents repository."

Their top priority is developing support for different languages. Voice assistants tend to work with English commands only, but Home Assistance believes that people should be able to speak in their own language when using the voice assistant.

As mentioned in their blog, they will be starting with a few actions first and building up around them. Home Assistant has a user interface that supports 62 languages, and the aim is to support all languages for voice commands.

A Lot of Work to Do

Even if Home Assistance has been around for a while, it's technically starting out again since it will be functioning on its own. There are a lot of aspects a voice assistant has to work on like hot word detection, speech-to-text, intent recognition, intent execution, text-to-speech, and more.

It still can't function like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant, which has internet-connected functions. That means you can't ask it questions like what's the best app for music streaming or purchase items from an online retail store.

Since it's open-sourced, the community can help expedite the process of making it better. For instance, you can say "turn on the bedroom lights" and write it as "turn on the {area} lights." It will become a more universal command which will respond to other areas in the house as well.

Home Assistance created a YAML-based format to test out the sentences. There will also be language leaders to oversee the contributions in their respective languages. Part of their job is to make sure that the grammar is correct.

Anyone can apply as a language leader by joining #devs_voice on Discord, or opening an issue in the company's intents repository. People can contribute sentences from their language to add to the collection of commands.

In other news, Home Assistant picked up a smart home interoperability standard and open-source protocol called Matter. This means that there's a possibility that you can use the voice assistant to control devices in just one platform.