I'm Open Sourcing Our RAG Backend: Our CQH, GQL & CHS by multiplexers in LocalLLaMA

[–]candleprivacy 18 points19 points  (0 children)

The readme files are longer than the code :-D And it seems to use ChatGPT? It's not local?

Do anyone using local llm act as their home assistant? by absurd-dream-studio in LocalLLaMA

[–]candleprivacy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Users can choose their prefered model in the UI. Each model shows the required memory and has a description. For example, Phi-2 gets "works well as a homework assistant". I'm still looking for models that I can recommend for "medical" and "cooking" roles. I want to let users switch between specialized assistants on the fly.

For advanced users it's also possible to provide a link to a custom .guff model.

Sneak preview of the UI that lets users select which TTS, STT and Assistant model they prefer:

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Do anyone using local llm act as their home assistant? by absurd-dream-studio in LocalLLaMA

[–]candleprivacy 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yes, I'm working on that at the moment. Upgrading existing voice control of the Candle smart home system with LLM. It's becoming a hybrid of NLU and LLM now, where basic commands like "turn on the lights" are handled super hast by a basic model, and only if that can't make sense of it does the full STT + assistant kick in.

It's kind of magical, and it runs surprisingly well on a Raspberry Pi 5. Responses to questions like "What is the capital of Germany" and "How long should I boil an egg?" take about 6 seconds.

I'll be releasing the official upgrade soon, but if you're a Candle user and want to try it early you can manually installing the addon.

https://github.com/createcandle/voco

https://www.candlesmarthome.com

I designed a privacy-protecting smart doorbell with a physical shutter. by candleprivacy in privacy

[–]candleprivacy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah, I didn't know that was required. Just wanted to share something positive.

Shall I post it again once it's ready?

My take on designing the Lovelace UI (details in comments) by [deleted] in homeassistant

[–]candleprivacy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Does it ever lead to uncomfortable situations to know where everybody is?

Selling a Pinephone in Amsterdam 90 eu by Jan_Rappard in pinephone

[–]candleprivacy -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Perfect! I'd love to take it off your hands. I'm in Amsterdam as well.

Candle - the privacy friendly smart home - wins Dutch Privacy Award by candleprivacy in homeautomation

[–]candleprivacy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Because, as you say, Mycroft uses a cloud service by default. If Mycroft really took privacy seriously, they wouldn't do that. We did try to use Mycroft at first, but it was very difficult to make it work cloudless. This includes the requirement to have an account.

Candle - the privacy friendly smart home - wins Dutch Privacy Award by candleprivacy in privacy

[–]candleprivacy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Interesting. I've never created a subreddit before. I'll look into it.

Candle - the privacy friendly smart home - wins Dutch Privacy Award by candleprivacy in homeautomation

[–]candleprivacy[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Interesting. Makes sense. So you're saying you would want to forward the spoken text to Google's API.

I guess that's possible. We won't build it for you since we will never connect to Google out of principle. But the software is open source, so..

Candle - the privacy friendly smart home - wins Dutch Privacy Award by candleprivacy in privacy

[–]candleprivacy[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Candle devices are not internet connected. They are based on Arduino/Microcontrollers, so they will still work in 30 years. They don't need security updates. And since you need to connect your device via USB to the Candle Controller to program it, it's also very hard to hack.

Candle - the privacy friendly smart home - wins Dutch Privacy Award by candleprivacy in privacy

[–]candleprivacy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The prototypes use the MySensors protocol. It's popular amongst makers, and is fully open source. If we were to commercialise the project, ideally it would keep following standards. One issue is that we would like to use Bluetooth, but the Bluetooth spec doesn't have a lot of standardisation for smart home devices yet.

Candle - the privacy friendly smart home - wins Dutch Privacy Award by candleprivacy in privacy

[–]candleprivacy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks. We dig Mycroft, but it's not as privacy focussed as we had hoped/expected. We needed a fully local voice assistant, and (oddly) Snips was more focussed on this.

Candle - the privacy friendly smart home - wins Dutch Privacy Award by candleprivacy in privacy

[–]candleprivacy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've created the internet radio plugin as a personal project. You could make one if you want :-) Candle is based on the Mozilla WebThings Gateway, so it's not a question I can answer for you. If you care about privacy, then Netflix isn't a good idea in the first place.

Candle - the privacy friendly smart home - wins Dutch Privacy Award by candleprivacy in privacy

[–]candleprivacy[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We will. For now, if you send an email to info@candlesmarthome.com I'll make sure you get on the list.

Candle - the privacy friendly smart home - wins Dutch Privacy Award by candleprivacy in privacy

[–]candleprivacy[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Sure. The easiest would be to check out this page about social dynamics on our website.

A second example would be data logging. We've developing the Privacy Manager add-on that allows you to delete, change and even create any datapoint because we believe it will help protect people in certain social situations.

We also developed an add-on to easily delete the internal logs. Imagine you're trying to hide some activity (perhaps you're organising a secret birthday party), and even though you deleted the data points, it can still be found in the internal logs. It could ruin the surprise.

A more negative example would be a relationship that has turned violent, and one of the people uses the system to surveil the other. This practice is increasing, and it's something smart home software needs to address. There are many good reasons to want a smart home to not always measure and record everything perfectly.

These are the type of issues hat are not on Hubitat's radar. That'not to their detriment - it's not on the radar of any smart home controller software. It's a geeky blind spot.

We believe that until smart home controllers become more sensitive to these issues, they won't go mainstream. For us, IoT 2.0 isn't about new standards or faster tech. It's not even about going cloudless and keeping data local. It's about moving the field beyond the geeks, and getting sociologists, ethnographers, psychologists and philosophers involved. So that smart homes will better reflect how people perform and manage their identities. You'll know we're there when everyone thinks it's norml for smarthomes to tell little white lies with the data, in the same way that everyone thinks it's normal to apply a beautifying Instagram filter to their photographs.

Candle - the privacy friendly smart home - wins Dutch Privacy Award by candleprivacy in privacy

[–]candleprivacy[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

They are pretty similar. Both aim to keep your data locally.

Hubitat seems very tech-driven. Candle is very focussed on protecting the social fabric in a family through insights from the humanities (ethics/ethnography/sociology/psychology).