Voice Assistants

[slychiu]

The Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition is a voice assistant hardware which  seamlessly integrates with Home Assistant. Its audio processor and dual microphones allow it to hear your commands and control devices in Home Assistant similar to Amazon Echo.

The Getting Started Guide is here https://support.nabucasa.com/hc/en-us/ar...ew-Edition

one of the many Youtube videos on the setup and usage is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vceoL59pmkk

Setting up is easy. However note that if you use Duckdns with Lets Encrypt so that access locally and remotely by by https, Voice  PE will not work as it requires access by http for setup and operation.



You can select a preferred pipeline for processing the voice. This is done at setup but you can change it in Settings > Voice Assistants 



A good description of these options are in the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhlIaBG3Ldo at around  2 minutes.

My experience is the performance of the speech recognition is far better with Nabu Casa Cloud (which requires a subscription) compared to the local processing options, though this may be due to my accent - It may work better for european and american  voices. There may be ways to tune the speech recognition engines but I have not explored them. The Cloud processing option is also significantly faster than the local processing.

[slychiu]

You can use Assist on your mobile device through the Home Assistant Companion App.

Open the Home Assistant Companion App on your Android or iOS device.

Navigate to the Assist tab. This is usually located at the bottom of the screen (it might be represented by a microphone icon or labeled \"Assist\").

Tap the microphone icon. This will activate the voice input and wait for speech detection.

If you have a Nabu Casa cloud subscription, you can go ahead now
Speak your command or question clearly. For example, \"Turn on the living room lights,\" \"What is the temperature in the bedroom?\", or \"Play some  music on the media player.\"
The app will send your audio to your configured Assist pipeline in Home Assistant.
You will see the text transcription of your command and the response from Assist within the app.  This method does not need the Voice Preview edition hardware at all, and works better..

If you do not have the Nabu Casa Cloud subscription you can set up Local pipelines for text to speech and speech to text without the Voice Preview Edition hardware.

For documentation see https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_local_assistant/ 

Go to Settings > Add on, select AddOn store on bottom right. Look for Whisper Add-on for Speech to Text and Piper for Text to Speech. Install the two add-ons and start them/ Check the add on logs for no error.
Next to to Settings > Devices and Services. You should see the Whisper and Piper integrations in auto discovery for the Wyoming integration




Add the 2 integrations.

Go to Setttings > Voice Assistants. Select Home Assistant as Preferred (with the Star beside it) instead of Home  Assistant Cloud.




Select Home Assistant.



For Speech to Text, select faster-whisperer. For Text to speech select Piper.
Press Update

This should allow the mobile phone Assist feature to send voice commands. Again, the speech recognition performance is not as good as with Nabu Casa Cloud

[color=\"#ff0000\"]Note that this does not work if Duckdns with Lets encrypt has been used to use https for Home assistant local and remote access. http is required[/color]

[slychiu]

The list of enmtities that can be controlled by the Voice assistant is in Settings > Voice Assistants -> Expose Tab 


   The entity Names are the items that can be controlled. To expose other entities, prss the EXPOSE Entities  button on the top right 



You can use the Alias for each entity to simply the name to be pronounced.

In Home Assistant, aliases are alternative names you can give to your entities, areas, and floors. When an entity is exposed to a voice assistant like the built-in \"Assist\" or Google Assistant, these aliases can be used in voice commands to refer to that entity.

Here\'s where you can find and manage aliases for exposed entities in Home Assistant:

1. Via the Home Assistant UI (for Assist and Google Assistant):

    Go to Settings in the sidebar.
    Click on Voice assistants.
    Open the Expose tab.

You will see a list of your entities. Select the entity for which you want to see or add an alias.
In the pop-up window for that entity, you\'ll find a section to manage aliases. You can add, edit, or delete aliases here.

    Make sure the relevant voice assistant (Assist and/or Google Assistant) is selected for the entity to be exposed with these aliases.

2. Via the Entity\'s Settings:

    Go to Settings in the sidebar.

Click on Devices & Services.
Click on Entities.
Find the specific entity you are interested in and click on it to open its details.
In the top right corner of the entity\'s information page, click the cog icon (Settings).
Scroll down to the Advanced settings section. Here, you might find an option to set an \"Alias.\" This alias is primarily used by the built-in \"Assist\" voice assistant and can also be used by Google Assistant.

How Aliases Work with Voice Assistants:

When you expose an entity to a voice assistant and define aliases, you can use either the entity\'s friendly name or any of its aliases in your voice commands.

For example, if you have a light entity named \"Living Room Lamp\" and you set an alias \"Lamp\" for it, you can say:

    \"OK Nabu, turn on Living Room Lamp.\"
    \"OK Nabu, turn on Lamp.\"

This makes controlling your devices more natural and allows for different ways to refer to the same thing.
\"OK Nabu\" is only necessary for local voice  control by Voice Preview  Edition hardware. not in the mobile app