I was a heavy voice user of the old Google Assistant, as well as Google Home/Nest speakers, and have really grown to hate its Gemini based replacement on my phone. So often it screws up with basic commands that were intuitive and reliable on the old Assistant. It’s also slower and feels like a waste of resources to query an LLM for simple device and smart home commands

  • obsoleteacct@lemm.eeEnglish
    8·
    15 hours ago

    It’s a terrible replacement for Assistant. It’s just the wrong tool for the job. Assistant was listening for commands and trying to turn those into actions. Gemini takes a second, misses the first half of the command, tries to figure out if I’m conversing or giving an instruction, and it’s hit or miss if it gets that right.

    If I ask “what’s the weather today?” I have no idea if I’ll get a forecast, the definition of the word weather, or the song “what’s the weather like today” by the Kiboomers (which sounds like a cool indie band but in fact makes childrens early education songs).

    Does anyone know an open source alternative for Android? Preferably something that works with home assistant.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      5·
      14 hours ago

      Home assistant does have voice, and they’re trying out their own in home devices. It has an app for android and you can map your primary assistant to it

    • dantheclamman@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      14 hours ago

      I have been fiddling with Home Assistant’s voice command solution. Because I have it running on raspberry pi, it is not fast enough to process commands efficiently, but I am probably going to move it to an old desktop I’ve been using as a home server and see if it runs faster.

      • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        10 hours ago

        Nabu Casa subscription would get you their voice processing which works well. I would trust them way, way ahead of Google for privacy even if it isn’t self-hosted for the voice processing.

        They are also working on getting whisper working better locally, that’s a priority for them. The subscription is basically to support HA in general, because they work very hard at not enshittifying the Home Assistant environment.