Home Assistant’s Voice Preview Edition is a small box with big privacy powers

On By Littum

Home Assistant today announced the availability of Voice Preview Editionits own design of a living room-friendly box to offer voice assistance with home automation. After using it for a few weeks, it seems like a good start, at least for those who are comfortable digging into the settings. That’s why Home Assistant calls it a “Preview Edition”.

Uses its privacy oriented Nabu Casa cloud— or your own computer — to handle the processing, the Voice Preview Edition (VPE) ($60/60 euros, available today) has the gross footprint of a modern Apple TV, but is thinner. It works similarly to an Amazon Echo, Google Assistant or Apple Siri device, but with a more focused target. Start with a wake word – the default and most well-trained version is “Okay, Nabu”, but “Hey, Jarvis” and “Hey, Mycroft” are available. Follow that with a command, typically something targeted at a smart device in the home: “Turn on lights in the living room,” “Set the thermostat to 68,” “Enable TV Time.” And then it usually happens.

Home Assistant’s Voice Preview Edition does what it does best. I had to set a weather service to an alias for “weather outside” to get that response produced.

“That thing” is primarily to control devices, scenes and automations in your home, set up in Home Assistant. This means that you must have assigned them a name or alias that you can remember. Coming up with naming schemes is also something you end up doing in big-tech smart home systems, but it’s a bit more important with VPE.

You don’t have to start over with all your gear if you at least have a Google Home, Alexa or Apple Home ecosystem. Home Assistant has great “bridging” capabilities built in to connect all the devices you’ve set up and named in these ecosystems.

Getting a properly organized smart home set up with a VPE box is important because it doesn’t really do much else, for better or for worse. Unless you plug it into an AI model.

The voice unit that is intentionally not very talkative

The VPE box can run timers (with neat LED ring progress indicators), and with a little tweaking of settings, you can connect it to Home Assistant’s built-in shopping lists and to-do lists, or most other plug-ins or extensions to your system. If you are willing to mess with LLMs– like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini – locally or via cloud subscriptions, you can trigger prompts with your voice, although performance will vary.