Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition

Goodbye Google Home. My quest for self hosting hit another milestone today, being able to finally unplug my Google Home speaker. HA Voice PE has been a full replacement once I added an LLM and an external speaker. Unfortunately, the LLM is connected through an online API and not local, but that should come with my server overhaul that I plan to do this year. Even still, the fact that the LLM is only used as a fallback and no personal info was supplied other than an IP through a VPN, it's at least better than a Google account that's tied to browser history, purchases, and all the data you feed …

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

With the latest updates, the voice PE does a great job with announcements, IMO. The default now has a pre-announcement bell sound as a heads up, and there's no longer (as far as I can tell) a need to add a delay after speaking to prevent announcements from talking over each other. I have an ikea symfonisk (sonos) and I'm slowly migrating my announcements over to the Voice PE. I'm sure others will have recommendations, this is just my experience so far, HA user for about a year now.

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

Home Assistant Preview Edition with Local LLM - Success. Just wanted to share my experience and current setup with Home Assistant Preview Edition and an LLM. I've always wanted an self hosted alternative to Google/Amazon spying devices (smart speaker). Right now, thanks to the home assistant preview edition, I feel like I have a suitable and even more powerful replacement and I'm happy with my setup. All this magic manages to fit on 24GB of VRAM on my 3090 Right now, my topology looks like this: --- Home Assistant Preview or Home Assistant Smartphone app Let's me give vocal and/or text …

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

I have it sitting next to me. Setup was a breeze, wakeword detection works perfectly. However, I haven't yet got it to perform any action reliably. I usually get something along the line of "no device with that name" or "no area of that name". I seem to be doing something wrong.

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

I just got one, and for simple device commands/statuses, it's great (as long you give each device/entity an easy, unique name to refer to them). For other (AI) stuff, local use only takes some tinkering and it's slow unless you have dedicated GPU acceleration. If you subscribe to cloud/Nabu Casa, it's nearly as fast as Alexa, Google.

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.

My experience with HA voice assistant (non-cloud) has been extremely disappointing, to the point where it’s entirely useless for the use case you describe. The HA voice assistant PE in combination with an Orin Jetson nano fails to interpret most commands accurately, is extremely slow, and has a bunch of false positives where it detects its wake word when no command was issued. Some people have reported success with some of the cloud based tools; but depending on some cloud service is opposite to my goals of using HA in the first place.

Excerpt saved from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 2026-10-23.