There\u2019s a new voice assistant in town, and this one can work locally in your home without phoning home to its corporate overloads. This week, the popular hobbyist smart home platform Home Assistant officially launched<\/a> its first voice assistant hardware \u2014 Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Built for the open-source smart home platform, Voice PE costs $59<\/a> and brings a locally controlled, privacy-focused voice assistant to Home Assistant in a plug-and-play package. Once connected to Home Assistant<\/a>, you can use voice to control any connected device<\/a>, with commands such as \u201cTurn on the living room lights,\u201d \u201cLock all the doors,\u201d \u201cCreate a timer for 5 minutes,\u201d and many more<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n While Home Assistant users have been able to control their smart homes with voice using either Home Assistant\u2019s Assist<\/a> on less capable third-party hardware<\/a> or through the cloud by connecting to third-party services like Amazon Alexa<\/a> and Google Assistant<\/a>, this is the first dedicated Home Assistant voice hardware product. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Voice PE is the culmination of\u00a0Home Assistant\u2019s Year of the Voice<\/a>, an effort from Nabu Casa, the organization behind Home Assistant, to let users control their homes locally, privately, and in their own language. It currently\u00a0supports over 50 languages<\/a>, compared to eight for Alexa and 20 for Google Assistant.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Voice PE is a small white box, about the size of your palm, with dual microphones and an audio processor. An internal speaker lets you hear the assistant, but you can also connect a speaker to it via a 3.5 mm headphone jack for better-quality media playback. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Out of the box, you can talk to Assist with the wake words \u201cOkay Nabu,\u201d \u201cHey Jarvis,\u201d or \u201cHey Mycroft.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A colored LED ring on top of the Voice PE indicates when the assistant is listening. It surrounds a rotary dial and a physical button, which is used for setup and to talk to the voice assistant without using the wake word. The button can also be customized to do whatever you want (because this is Home Assistant). A physical mute switch is on the side, and the device is powered by USB-C (charger and cable not included). There\u2019s also a Grove port where you can add sensors and other accessories.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Speaking of wake words, out of the box, you can talk to Assist with the wake words \u201cOkay Nabu,\u201d \u201cHey Jarvis,\u201d or \u201cHey Mycroft.\u201d If you want to get fancy, you can program a custom wake word<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The assistant can run locally in your home without an internet connection on Home Assistant hardware (such as the Home Assistant Green hub<\/a>), or it can use the Home Assistant cloud<\/a>. According to Nabu Casa, the latter is faster and supports more languages<\/a>. The company says your data is not stored on the cloud nor used for training.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 1\/7<\/p>\n 1\/7<\/p>\n For those who don\u2019t like the idea of always-listening microphones in their home from companies such as Amazon and Google, but who still want the convenience of controlling their home with their voice, the potential here is huge. But it may be a while until Voice PE is ready to replace your Echo or Nest smart speaker. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Verge<\/em>\u2019s Callie Wright, a Home Assistant superuser, has been testing the Voice PE for a few weeks. While they are impressed with its capabilities (although it had some trouble understanding them when there was background noise), they aren\u2019t quite ready to kick Alexa to the curb. \u201cI think Amazon\u2019s Alexa is still worth the privacy tradeoffs for me just because there are key things for me that Voice PE can\u2019t pull off,\u201d they say. \u201cBut the progress Home Assistant has made in its Year of the Voice has been incredible, and I\u2019m more hopeful than ever that that future is coming.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n While the intention is to surpass \u201cBig Tech voice assistants,\u201d Paulus Schoutsen, founder of Home Assistant, recognizes it\u2019s not there yet. Hence, Voice is launching as a Preview Edition. \u201cFor some, the current capabilities of our voice assistant will be all they need, especially those who just want to set timers, manage their shopping list, and control their most used devices,\u201d says Schoutsen. \u201cFor others, we understand they want to ask their voice assistant to make whale sounds or to tell them how tall Taylor Swift is \u2014 our voice assistant doesn\u2019t do those things\u2026 yet<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the meantime, if you want more features, Voice PE can connect to supported AI models<\/a>, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, to fully replace Assist or use it as a fallback for commands it doesn\u2019t understand. But for many smart home users, there will be plenty of value in a simple, inexpensive device that lets you turn your lights on and off, start a timer, and execute other useful commands with your voice without relying on an internet connection.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n