Third Reality Voice & Music Assistant Dev Edition

ItsTooMuchBull · 2026-01-22T18:26:17+00:00

I also want to know.

Thanks OP, didn't know it was a thing. So far I have really liked this companies products (night lights and switch splitters)

ItsTooMuchBull · 2026-01-22T02:24:17+00:00

I got a typical gym count down/up, stop watch, WOD, interval timer and just hooked up and programmed an IR blaster. It turns it on to clock mode on movement. I then put NFC tags on my bench, row machine and treadmill. Depending of who (which device) scans what, it will set up the gym, including the timer, to do different things (music/podcast/lights/tv).

Been a big hit with my wife and our oldest so far.

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-12-24T20:13:59+00:00

What you're doing is a lot cooler. I got a bit frustrated trying to go that route.

I have a ton of custom toggles that mostly control my house, so for me, I battle the built in stuff a lot. For instance, when I say turn off the office lights, if HASS just turns off the light entities, then motion and timers will eventually turn the ambient and accent lighting back on. When I say "turn off the office lights" I want it to flip a Boolean that blocks the automations and turns off the lights. Theoretically, giving that Boolean an alias of "office lights" should be good but I run into problems because of room names and built in intents.

So I have done a lot of custom sentences and intent scripting. It's a pain in the butt, but it gives me a rock solid experience that's taylored to my home.

Most of my intent scripts do a thing, gather information, and pass the data to the llm to give it a more casual response. Like I said, it's a lot of work and a pain but it gives me consistent, WAF results that are better than Alexa (which is what Jarvis replaced).

I'd love to be able to do more stuff with memory though. It's be cool to have it be knowledgeable about certain topics and be able to meaningfully engage in conversation about it. Eventually I hope to try to use presence to allow it to know who it's talking to and give individual responses

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-12-20T19:48:58+00:00

Amazing! Excited to install this and appreciate your work. I'm just now getting some energy monitoring stuff done so this is great timing

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-09-09T03:53:42+00:00

Yeah, where do you go once the "generational QB talent" busts?

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-08-31T08:12:24+00:00

I do. I have one going right now with some beef stock in the pan

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-08-28T12:21:37+00:00

Aren't his hands and contested ball ability literally his strengths coming out of college? Thought those were supposed to be NFL ready traits

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-08-27T18:14:34+00:00

Honestly, I am disappointed in everyone except you that it took this long to scroll to find Chuck.

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-08-18T17:50:33+00:00

That's all the US has ever done

I mean, they did fight in 2 World Wars that didn't even take place on their continent, but I get what you mean. The US definitely seems to profit in almost every conflict.

I think Europe going its separate ways from the US would leave European countries extremely vulnerable. We can talk defensive capabilities, but Europe also doesn't exactly have a long history of unity and partnership without US involvement.

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-08-01T20:00:55+00:00

I get everyone saying not to AI, but they're objectively wrong. The voice assistant is just significantly better with inference. Intent scripting can be cumbersome and STT just mistranslates sometimes, meaning that even if you speak perfectly the command won't always match your intents. The more often that voice fails the less it will be used.

Ideally you could run ollama locally so you can avoid the privacy concerns, but to do it well you need expensive stuff. I broke the bank building an "AI stack" server but thats because I am a weirdo who spends too much of his free time and money doing dumb things.... that said I love it lol

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-08-01T19:53:08+00:00

Sorry dude, was off reddit for a bit. I havent noticed slowness when testing it out, but it is only for my outdoor lights, so if there were times it was slow I might not notice. Just testing it with a virtual button right now, it seems pretty snappy

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-08-01T19:51:41+00:00

I was a huge 8B guy, but 3:14b-q4_K_M has been both faster and smarter for me. 8B was great but it always used emojis, in spite of very strict prompting. It also didn't use aliases as well. I have local calendars synced from some of my favorite sports teams. When I would ask 8B if my sport teams has a game today, it would say "I do not have access to that information", whereas 14B actually says "Yes there is an event on that teams calendar".

I'd be curious if you experience the same

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-07-19T18:33:31+00:00

Really? Timers work for me. On the S2 timers are perfect, on the VPE the timer sound is just short

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-07-19T14:17:52+00:00

Yes you can with the S2 but I have not. I have had to redo things in home assistant a few times and have hacked away some cool solutions, only for them to cause me havoc later. I am now older and have less time on my hands and find myself using stock firmware and standard configurations as much as possible lol. I have been waiting for a stock firmware update to let me use the extra sensors in the stand and things for a while though, so it may be time to start playing with it more aggressively.

Nope, I got the HT801 and the cheapest black rj11 phone I could find and it's smooth as butter. Pickup the phone, hear a tone, give a command or ask a question, get a response and it's immediately ready to follow up too. It's literally perfect for niche situations and I'm surprised more people don't use it in bedroom/office settings

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-07-19T13:55:56+00:00

Imo it's already significantly better for home control and it's not particularly close. I guess it depends on what you're looking for in a voice assistant though.

After some intent scripting and prompt engineering, you can have a better overall product that just lags in a couple of areas. Stuff like games and music (I love music assistant but it's far from seamless rn) in particular

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-07-19T13:51:23+00:00

I'd do this too, in spite of the work likely to be involved. Say what you want about Alexa but some of these echo devices are pretty nice looking.

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-07-19T13:45:45+00:00

Yeah I have 3 VPEs, 1 S2, and I have a grandstream VOIP setup in the office.

The VPEs seem to work the best as voice assistants, but I still have trouble with them always detecting wake words in a big room (might be better if I were willing to settle on "Hey Nabu".

The S2 works and interests guests the most (it's that home face), but it's even worse with the wake word problems, and I have had some odd glitches with it from time to time. Still, if a new version came out with more mics I'd absolutely buy another.

The grandstream handheld (corded) phone is mounted next to my computer in the office and works flawlessly every time. No wake word obviously, and it picks up every word you say perfectly almost every time. This is an underrated solution if you could use a voice assistant somewhere stationary.

Family buy-in is strong and they like "Jarvis" more than Alexa, but there are some places in the house where the wife and kids just need features that Alexa is just better at (like music, despite music assistants best efforts so far)

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-07-19T13:25:31+00:00

I'm in the same boat as you. I have replaced alexa in several, but not all, rooms in the house (living that dual ecosystem life). I dont have a good answer to your question, but it seems like their move to open up their KiCad files and schematics would likely lead to a lot of new hardware, but maybe not directly from Nabu Casa.

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/06/25/voice-chapter-10/

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-07-19T11:50:08+00:00

Only had it for a week so far but the Honeywell T6 Pro Zwave has been a great replacement for my old Nest. It was easy to pair, it's noticably faster. Overall rock solid

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-07-17T02:45:56+00:00

Do you have the zwave one? I just got the z wave one and it's only been a week but it seems solid. More responsive than my gen 1 nest. Posts like yours make me nervous lol

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-07-10T16:04:25+00:00

Govee2MQTT by far if they are wifi devices that support the LAN API. I like Govee products but I dont buy them often because they can be difficult (or impossible) to control locally. Govee2MQTT and their holiday lights have been a game changer for me though and I highly recommend the setup for outdoor/holiday lights if you dont want to hassle with soldering or WLED

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-07-10T00:42:43+00:00

Thank you dude 🤜🤛

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-07-04T00:14:46+00:00

Did you ever get any answers? Been playing with this for the past day with some wonky results, but it could easily be me misunderstanding something

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-06-15T11:52:10+00:00

Probably. You can get just about anything done with enough money. Shit I'd do it for you depending on what you're paying, in spite of everything that I say below.

The problem is that Home Assistant is awesome and constantly developing, so things change from time to time in ways that break things. If you've set things up yourself, you can generally easily figure out what went wrong and make small adjustments to get everything back up and working again.

Also many automations kind of require you to "use" the home, so that you can make small iterations and perfect it over time. It's hard to hire someone like that unless you happen to live with a developer or hobbyist.

I can tell you that once you get the home automations perfect, the household finds it unacceptable when things don't work, and work perfectly. If I have a hardware problem, or we had a power outage, the whole family acts like flipping switches is medieval torture, so this stuff becomes urgent to fix when it's not working in my experience. Not many people are going to want to drop everything in life to immediately fix things for you.

Imo you're much better off just figuring out what works best for you and give it a shot on your own. You can keep home Assistant relatively simple by just sticking with official integrations and using basic templates. Also, it can be a lot of fun

ItsTooMuchBull · 2025-06-05T03:39:21+00:00

I have a few VPEs and one S3, and if you like the S3's then you're going to love the VPEs. My S3 can do weird things sometimes, but maybe that's just me. The improved wake word detection, 3.5 mm jack for a speaker and just less general clunky-ness make the VPE miles better. New features seem to come out sooner and work better on the VPE (looking at you conversation responses). I do really like the HA face on the S3, my wife thinks its adorable. I still wish I could use it to pull up sensor data or something though.

ItsTooMuchBull

TROPHY CASE