HA Voice control devices

Automation Inspirations
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I am based in the UK and want to get rid of Alexa in my House and setup voice devices to control HA.

I know I can reflash some of the alexa devices, but ultimately want to run Native Control.

Any ideas or suggestion, as the HA made PE Voice devices are almost £60 each and look a bit flakey

I then will build my own LLM to run Jarvices fro home autonimise control running locally, but to start I will use the Jarvis HACS add in for simple device control

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I would separate the voice pipeline from the room microphones before buying several new speakers. If you already have an Android phone or tablet available, the official Assist on Android guide lets you test native Home Assistant control using the Companion app and a local pipeline. That would let you check command recognition and the entities you want to expose before spending money on more hardware. Android wake-word listening has a documented battery cost, so I would treat that as a useful pilot, not a promise of a drop-in always-on Alexa replacement.

For basic device control, Assist does not require an LLM. On Home Assistant OS, the local setup guide covers Speech-to-Phrase or Whisper for speech recognition, with Piper for speech output. Speech-to-Phrase supports a restricted set of home-control commands, while Whisper is more open-ended. What hardware runs your Home Assistant instance, and which language do you want to use? Those details would help narrow down a sensible local pipeline before choosing dedicated room devices.

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I have allready done the above and I am using local LLM with a fallback LLM running Jarvis with Claude Haku
I am planing to eventually run my own LLM once i have built the infrastructure for it

I was looking at options to use for full house voice control but 60 a pop and then needing one in each room will work out a small fortune

I have a control tablet and jarvis works well with it, but tablets dont have multiple omni microphones etc

I did not want to go down the self build route and using esp boards and 3d printing, i was trying to find a solution thats allready out there

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I recently saw a YouTuber who had tried out all kinds of different setups. When it came to the hardware for the microphone, he had the following options to choose from:

  • Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition (It runs smoothly, is recognized immediately, and the wake word works reliably from a few meters away. The sound quality, however, is on par with a kitchen radio)
  • FutureProofHomes Satellite 1 (Best sound and best microphones in this class, and you can buy it fully assembled)
  • ThirdReality Voice (Good sound quality, completely Linux-based. It crashed during testing, and music playback via Music Assistant kept cutting out - may have been fixed by the manufacturer)
  • DIY: ReSpeaker Lite (With the kit and speakers included, it sounds about as good as the ThirdReality)
  • DIY: ReSpeaker XVF3800 (The best in terms of microphones. More expensive; there are hardly any good enclosures with speakers, few 3D-printing projects, and no ready-made kit)
  • DIY: M5 Voice Pyramid mit AtomS3R (The firmware still has many issues. In addition, the microphone and speaker share an I2S bus: the wake word doesn’t respond while music is playing, and there is no barge-in or echo cancellation)

Source (in German): Lokale Sprachsteuerung mit Home Assistant: Whisper, Piper und lokale KI ohne Cloud

Alternatively, here’s the full video (the audio is in German, but there’s an AI translation into English): https://youtu.be/wmWBFqbp-5Q?si=NEu8Kh_Nig4HcGzn

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I would separate the small-speaker criticism from microphone performance when comparing the finished units. Home Assistant’s specifications describe a dual-microphone array and XMOS echo cancellation, but say the Voice PE’s built-in speaker is intended for voice feedback rather than music. That is a specification-based comparison, not a claim about pickup or reliability in your rooms. It is a reason not to use a music-playback comparison alone to judge a voice-control endpoint.

I also checked Seeed’s ReSpeaker Lite bundle. It includes options for a pre-soldered controller, a speaker and an assembleable acrylic enclosure, and Seeed’s HA guide still involves firmware setup. That is not the same as a fully assembled appliance, so I would rule it out for your no-build requirement rather than quote the bare-board price as a saving. I haven’t verified a cheaper finished UK alternative that meets your requirements.

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