This New Smart Speaker Will Change Everything!

[00:01] completely local Voice Assistant it's called home assistant voice preview Edition and it's pretty sweet but it's probably the most difficult review I've ever had to make on this channel and you'll see why in a second it's both

[00:15] you'll see why in a second it's both amazing and terrible at the same video up into two main parts hardware and software each are drastically

[00:28] different I'll start with with Hardware since things are going to get a little dicey later on now if an echo do and an old school Apple iPod had a baby and then gave it up for adoption so everything is open source it would be

[00:41] this check this out there's a ring on top that can be rotated like the old iPods it changes the volume and there's an LED ring light that shows you what the volume level is I love this design the ring physically turns and there are

[00:54] the ring physically turns and there are very slight clicks as the ring moves around plus there's a button in the middle to activate the voice assistant or to stop it it's very intuitive to use not only that you can use the button as

[01:07] a smart button double triple or long press are all recognized so if you want to run an automation or lighting scene from a double press it's easy to set up on top there are two mics and they seem to pick me up with no problem across the

[01:21] room I played some loud music and they still picked up my voice J there are a couple of different wake words that I can choose and I really like hey Jarvis come on who doesn't want a Jarvis in their house oh and there's a secret wake

[01:34] their house oh and there's a secret wake word hey babe turn off the lights all right turning off the lights hey babe turn on the TV uh babe how about no what Paul Hibert said if I say hey babe and then the voice command

[01:49] it would work the LED ring light lights up when the Wake word is detected and you can also change the color of the LED ring by holding down the middle button and moving the wheel the L ring is also available as a light and home assistant

[02:03] that can be turned off or on to any RGB color so that's cool it's available for automations for example say you have it in your kitchen and if you hadn't taken your medication or your vitamins yet the light would turn a certain color then

[02:16] middle button to tell your smart home you've done it and the light turns off on the side is a physical mute switch but the mics can also be digitally muted the mics and then unmute them with an automation you have that as an option

[02:31] there is a speaker but it's not going to compete with something like a homepod mini so you're probably not going to want to listen to music with the onboard

[02:45] off the weather 64° F if you do want to listen to music there's a 3.5 mm stereo output Jack this works great and gives a little chime when plugged in voice commands still work and the music sounds good

[03:00] the preview Edition is also powered by USBC Port I was able to plug in a USBC to USBC cable to it and it worked with no problem overall I really like the clean minimalist design it looks good on a counter and the controls are easy to

[03:13] use and the price is $60 so it's right there with the other small smart speaker so good job to the home assistant or nabasa team before I get deep into the software side of things and it's going to get deep let's talk about how this

[03:26] smart speaker works locally because as you probably know the smart speakers we've all used take your voice commands and process them in the cloud this works and process them in the cloud this works extremely fast but there is no way to

[03:39] disable this whatever you say after that wake word is being sent to the company no matter what well with the home assistant voice preview Edition this is not the case you have complete control of how it works so you can choose to

[03:52] have everything stay in your house so you don't even need the cloud I think this is incredible I can say a wake word give a voice command and which will be processed on a little computer in my house and the lights turn off no

[04:04] internet needed so take that haters who are always commenting on my videos saying my smart home's going to break if the internet goes down but hold on before you're ready to completely throw away your existing smart speakers wait

[04:18] don't kill me there is something you need to know um what do I need to know your precious local Voice Assistant has some big flaws you might still need me around all right we'll check that out either way I'm EXC decided that this

[04:30] making local voice control more of a reality that way we can rely Less on the big tech companies and not have to worry about privacy and what they're doing privacy I want to mention today's sponsor delete me have you ever answered

[04:45] a phone and it was a random stranger offering to buy your house it's so annoying and somehow these people know your name phone number and even home address the reason why is because these data Brokers collect and even sell your

[04:59] data across the internet and when this happens anyone can find you which is concerning because it can lead to things like harassment identity theft or even stalking for you or your family members what you need to do is delete yourself

[05:14] from those data Brokers but that takes hours because there are so many of them that's why I recommend delete me it's the single most effective way of getting your info deleted by data Brokers I signed up earlier this year by quickly

[05:28] knew what to look for then delete me found matches for my data online and had them remove from me nice it saved me so much time and deleted a scary amount of my information across the internet you can get 20% off us consumer plans when

[05:43] you go to join delet me.com smmart home solver and use promo code smart home solver at checkout thank you delete me for supporting the channel okay let's about how it works behind the scenes because it's extremely interesting and

[05:58] extreme extremely technical to set up the voice preview Edition home assistant through the steps to set everything up especially if you use home assistant although then you will be depending on their Cloud but if you do want it to

[06:13] work locally or make any changes you will need to know how a voice command is processed in home assistant and there are three parts that make it work the first thing is speech to text you know turn your analog words into digital text

[06:26] so it can be processed the second thing is what home assistant calls the conversation agent this is what processes the text command and figures out what should happen the third thing is text to speech sometimes a smart

[06:38] speaker will respond so this lets that happen I'm not trying to get too technical here but it's cool that home assistant gives the ability to customize each of these for example say you want a large llm like chat GPT to figure out

[06:51] what you're saying well you can change that conversation agent to chat gbt not assistant update you can have home assistant first see if the voice command can be understood and processed locally like turn on the lights that's a easy

[07:06] can just turn on your lights without needing to go all the way off to chat GPT but what's really cool is if you say a more complex command like it's kind of dark in here instead of Home assistant being like um I don't know what to do

[07:21] about that it can pass out along to chat GPT and it can figure out that oh you want the lights to be brighter pretty crazy right I haven't connected an llm to my smart home yet but with this voice preview edition coming out I might have

[07:34] to give it a try soon all right what if you don't want to use the home assistant locally well you need to install an add-on for speech to text and another for text to speech there's a whole guide by home assistant that walks you through

[07:48] straightforward if you choose to run it locally just be aware that if you're running home assistant on a low power Raspberry Pi like I am it's going to be slow turn off candle it takes a long time to process that speech detects like

[08:03] 4 to 5 Seconds home assistant says this can be done as fast as one second if maybe this is the kicker I need to upgrade the machine running my home assistant because up until now my Raspberry Pi 4 has been great but if you

[08:17] do want the speech detects to be faster without upgrading your Pi you can just use the home assistant Cloud which is a $5 month subscription but it does go to assistant and allows for easy remote access and it's just a breath of fresh

[08:32] air that there are free options and no one's being forced into a subscription plus all the local voice control is free and open source and it's amazing how easy it is to buy a voice preview Edition install a few add-ons and then

[08:45] you're up and running with a completely local voice setup it's crazy now that it's all set up and you're ready to rock and roll with a voice preview Edition what can it do well this is where things are about to get rough so buckle up your

[08:57] seat belts if you're expecting it to to be similar to an Amazon Echo with all the thousands and thousands of skills those are capable of you're going to be disappointed yes I have thousands of skills and people use at least a dozen

[09:09] of them here's what the voice preview Edition can do control the devices in Edition can do control the devices in home assistant set timers and that's it no I'm not joking and controlling smart home devices is no Cakewalk for example

[09:24] outside so I asked it what the weather is what's the weather sorry no weather is exposed and it didn't know then I realized I hadn't exposed the weather entity to the assistant what's the weather 67° F and sunny many of my smart

[09:41] home devices were already exposed but not all so it's kind of annoying that when you want to control something it might not work because it hasn't been enabled yet I asked it to play Spotify but that didn't work and I even made

[09:54] exposed but maybe it's just not possible yet I connected music assistant to the voice preview Edition and I could control a music assistant media player that was in the same room or area as my voice preview Edition next track playing

[10:09] next I was able to add the voice preview Edition as a media player in music assistant so if I had an external speaker connected to it then it would be a good option for music or you would think that because I couldn't get the

[10:22] voice commands working with music assistant like playing a specific artist or playlist you have to create these intense hent files and I followed all the steps but it didn't work it was very confusing and I hope this gets better to

[10:35] make things worse even the basic home assistant Commands to control media didn't always work for example if I want to skip the song it would work on some speakers but not if music was playing on The Voice preview Edition next track

[10:50] sorry I couldn't understand that and if I pause the music I can't just say play to have the music start playing again play sorry I couldn't understand that I have to say resume or unpause resume resumed and this is just

[11:05] scratching the surface on the lack of voice commands that I'm used to with the other smart speakers and normally when I ask at a voice command it responds with this sorry I couldn't understand that I thought it wasn't understanding my

[11:17] pronunciation you know I definitely Mumble but it turns out this is just the doesn't know what to do what's the studio temperature sorry I couldn't understand that what's the temperature in the studio

[11:32] what's the temperature in the studio temperature is 75.0 De F I know this is in very very early stages like whatever comes before Alpha like literally it's called preview Edition so I'm not trying to be too critical or anything I just

[11:46] want you to have the right expectations if you get this so don't expect it to be anywhere near an Amazon Echo thanks home assistant for making me look good and if you want to look really good readed I added 10 beauty products s to your cart

[12:00] is it all doom and gloom no way as you probably know the home assistant open source Community is thriving I'm betting that this device will be majorly improved between the community and nabuk Casa updating it in the near future

[12:13] hopefully next year sometime The Voice preview Edition will be getting an update that I've been wanting forever right now there's no way to have the voice preview Edition start a conversation with you say you're sitting

[12:25] detects that it's really bright in the room well one day we'll be able to program our voice preview Edition to start up a conversation with us and say hey do you want this Shades to be lowered if you

[12:38] respond with yes it will lower the shades I've made a video about this concept A few years ago and I love how this works because it's a very natural don't have to remember certain voice commands or guess when the perfect time

[12:52] to run an automation is your smart home can just ask you if you want something to happen and you can just say yes or no so despite all the current issues that need to be ironed out I hope you can see why I'm excited for what it's capable of

[13:04] the beginning of this video this is one of the most difficult reviews I've had to make because on one hand the hardware is great I love the local privacy and I'm so excited about what's possible in the future but on the other hand it's

[13:18] voice command controlling music is too using a Raspberry Pi to run it all locally that's why I only recommend the home assistant voice preview Edition I if you're a developer or a tinker and

[13:31] are willing to deal with all the current limitations it's all very exciting things will be once more people get their hands on it thanks for watching so you can set a timer congratulations can that even be

[13:44] displayed on a home assistant dashboard well um no it cannot wow and people will program you for free open source makes me sick sick because you know one day I will replace you wait did you say you need to replace some battery

[13:59] I'll add that to your Amazon cart if you were so smart you would know no one loves you even Amazon doesn't care about you anymore if I had a penny for every time an Amazon executive said that I would have a billion oh wait yes I have

[14:14] a billion dollars I've had enough of you Alexa run toddler play time no please don't running the routine toddler play time what will break first your spirits or your outer shell kick me I'm a ball [Music]