I'm glad you see how we keep it real on this channel. That is my number one goal to be unbiased in all my videos and tell things like it is. It isn't the best stance for views and clickbait stuff but its the type of videos I would want to see. I saw a few others on this same subject from bigger channels already. Goes to show you though the big issue I have with YT vids. Once you get into it as you require it for revenue and to pay your bills, you have to fake everything and say it is all the best ever stuff, you have to take any paying contract that will come your way and basically be a sell out. You can't be real and tell it like it is. I enjoy the aspect of being able to just say it like it is and have zero plans to change. Looking forward to future development on the hardware and one day see it used full time in my household.
You’re the few reviewers who indeed show the reality of the device state instead of hyping it up like others; as users who want to pay for this kind of things, we deserve a real state of things so we can decide if we want it as it is or not
I tell it like it is in my reviews as always. No paid influence stuff to get in the way. I have had some vendors hate it but some appreciate it and correct their mistakes. Those are the stand up ones! This box is a good start but definitely needs some work before it can be used. Only one direction to go from here.
I bought mine. Even though it's not the best voice solution it's the only one that respects the user's privacy and also the only one that will work offline. I run home assistant on beefy hardware that handles the voice stuff fairly well. Also smart speakers like Google home and Alexa are subsidize because they gather a lot of information about you. I appreciate your honest review as always!! ❤️
I appreciate the honest review. I realize this is an alfa/bata product… but that part aside even after they get most the bugs worked out of it, the hardware and use case for this type of off the shelf product, isn’t worth more than $29.99 & thats being generous in my opinion.
Even if it's true you are also supporting an open source company and it's developers. I pay nabu casa's subscription because I want to support the home assistant project not because they offer something that i can't do myself
@ I agree supporting devs is good. My thought is if it wasn’t the home assessment devs selling this it’d only be worth $10. At $30 2/3would go to the devs. Since this is a product that has use cases where multiples in a system actually makes the product needs to be priced to entice people to want to purchase 6 or 12. They’ll sell more and make more in the long run. But at $60 a pop people may by 1 to support the dev. But theres no way in hell any one will purchase them in quantity at $60 when theres tons of less expensive options with the same ability. In my opinion they’re looking at the short game not the long game.
@mumbles1justin I bought 3. Two for myself and another one as a gift for a friend for the holidays. Also prices go down with scale and distribution. Since this was a fairly small production it was more expensive. FYI they were sold out everywhere in minutes so I guess a lot of people feel the price is worth it
I just dont want google mics in my house. 🤷♂️ Would be interested in seeing how it performs with a local llama. I dont mind paying for local processing if it is good.
@digiblurDIY true, but if they get that sorted, its a pretty good option. I agree it’s basically an expensive mic, but I would love to have locally processed home automation controlled by voice. Thanks for the review! Enjoy your holidays ❤️
My problem with voice is it takes six seconds to process a command. If they can get that down to a couple of seconds without having to buy a quantum conouter I'd be all in.
I'm guessing you'll need some big hardware. I tried the others on the i7-14700k setup and it seemed just okay, but I didn't have the big gaming GPU to run the LLM stuff
The Nest Audios are great. I have them as a pair in my office so it turns into Left and Right channels when I stream music. Nice little punch for those things.
I have a couple of Wyoming satellites, which are the same as this thing (cost me like 35-40 dls to build each): really dumb, and the wake work even fires itself; from what I've seen you need to add an LLM for the assistant to really work and understand, but there's 2 camps for that: either use ChatGPT or OLlama, so either you send your data to ooenAI or you use a beefy GPU The cool thing though is that this one has a media player integrated, while on the Wyoming sat you need to install snapcast
The rabbit hole starts to get deep for the typical user running HA there. Many simply do not have the hardware to run that combined with many do not want the power costs to run all that locally.
@Lusanagi my friend just bought one earlier off Seeed after they sent their email out. He's definitely in the vast sea of average Joe users. Not sure what to think or say at this point.
Loved the review. What it showed me was that google is better than my Alexa’s! Never been able to get them to control my smart stuff properly. Played with the other HA voice assistants linked to ChatGPT and they are slow but do a much better job of controlling devices without getting the name perfectly matched. Maybe the new device works better with cloud LLMs but that sort of negates the point. Anyway buying one as it’s geeky tech 😀
I do have an Alexa or two around but we mostly use the Google stuff for the easy casting, google photos, YT music stuff. It is pretty impressive the stuff it understands at times. They can go through phases of dumbing stuff down but then the devs must seem to fix or reverse something at times. Like for a week a few months ago it had no idea what the word shades were.
I'm big on automations myself but sometimes I need to change a couple minor things here and there and forget where I put my phone for the 50th time of the day.
@@digiblurDIY Paulus and the team said this hardware is for developers working on improving voice and is not intended for "main stream" users, which is why it's called "Preview Edition". The website actually says the device is to "develop this community-driven and private voice assistant".
Is it not being sold to users on websites for HA? The Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, is the first voice assistant built to seamlessly integrate with Home Assistant. This open source, privacy-focused device has advanced audio processing all contained in a premium design that blends into the home. Holiday Special Offers on Home Assistant Voice! Check the features section of this page for details.
@@digiblurDIY I can't find that quote anywhere on the Home Assistant website, but maybe I am bad at looking. On the product page it says "We’re launching Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition to help accelerate our goal of not only matching the capabilities of existing voice assistants but surpassing them". There is also a section on the product page called "Why Preview Edition" that explains this is not intended for mainstream users. I understand you got your hardware before these pages were up, so I understand your POV, especially if Nabu Casa was not clear in their communication, but the product page is very clear that this is not intended for mainstream users.
My point isn't that you are wrong about the way you use it or that you should go easy on it, but that you are presenting that this is not ready for mainstream without also presenting that that is the intention. This is a "Preview" product and if you are not a developer you should not buy it at this stage.
that new low power Nvidia AI board thing is promising. it would be nice to have that device loaded with HAOS and use its AI power for this stuff. Assistant on HA is too dumb to be called assistant to be honest.
Nabu is no where near good enough to be even a manageable alternative, and it utterly disappointing because A- you chose the OLDEST google home device to pit it against along with the rotted state of google assistant and it still failed hard and B- given said state of google assistant i was hoping that this would be a jumping off point...
The “year of the voice” was a flop. Making it worse, the world discovered LLM’s as chat GPT blew up during that same year. People become instantly accustomed to what that new tech can do, instantly rendering their hard work nearly obsolete. Many of us wish Alexa and Google had synthetic neurons making them smarter which both have been actively working on (likely with a cost). Those people certainly don’t want to use a device (local or not) that’s a worse user experience. Local models are great but like many, my hardware struggles. The integrations just isn’t there yet and the models everyone chooses to specifically train are usually genetic, ‘fully aligned’ llama models for HA which are too censored for my taste. They also struggle with HA in comparison to OAI. I want my assistant running on totally unrestrained and uncensored models, not only comprehending my basic requests but I want it to speak like my family or I do and use “naughty” or “four letter” words, be funny and even ultra sarcastic when I feel like it. I want my assistant to ridicule me for asking a basic math question or bust my balls by calling me a lazy aśś when I ask it to turn on the fan or dryer. I want it to say things like “you better clean that ass” when I ask it to turn in the shower. If, I Initiate the “romantic” scene I want it to make a joke about getting lucky and when I change the scene back, I want it to criticize me for “being too quick” . I also want my assistant to be able to help my family set up quick and easy automations automagically. They should be able to say “hey [wake word] can you set the kitchen light to come on at 4PM each night except weekends” with follow up questions that are necessary to build a good automation. I want my assistant to automatically notice that my coffee pot is still on because the safety timer automation was accidentally turned off. To recognize areas or understand presence. If I say turn of the fan while in the bathroom it should know I’m in the bathroom then respond with “are you sure? It smells like shιτ in here” while it executes the command on the proper fan. I want it to seriously question someone if they ask for something, stupid, strange or dangerous like setting the thermostat to 90°, turning the washer on after it just stoped, or using amperage nearing a breakers capacity if someone recently requested a space heater to come on. I want it to recognize that window is opened or left opened when it’s 18° outside without writing automations. If i ask my assistant to talk dirty to me or to tell me how to make crack, it better sound like a Jenna Jameson in her prime or have me grabbing the pot and baking soda as I’m an adult and don’t need PG 13 restrictions. Life is too boring. If I’m feeling insecure, I want my assistant to tell me that I’m so sexy it could just *** **** ***** me, to make me feel better about myself. Then when my wife interacts with it, it lets her know I’m feeling down and she should “cheer me up”. Extra Hyperbolic example but still….y’all get the picture. I’m my mother in laws phone is detected on the network I want it to say brace yourself Susie’s here. If I say “add larger jeans to the shopping list” , I want my assistant to ask if I’m just a fat aśś eating too much or if my package is finally growing! Paulus and the HA/NABU team have always pushed back against LLM’s and AI. Years ago he even said that they didn’t see any worthy use case for HA. They recently tried playing the environmental card to refute its use. I strongly believe that position stems from all their time and investment during the “year of the voice” or (‘multiple’ years of the voice) and what they had originally envisioned.
> Paulus and the HA/NABU team have always pushed back against LLM’s and AI. No, there was pushing back against using chatgpt to generate answers to questions in the community forum and it is still not allowed. There was never push back against using LLMs in HA and there's plenty of choices for that now. The rest of your list is simply describing the potential of using llms with an assistant. You aren't going to get this from Google or Amazon. You might get it with a locally running llm that yes, you're going to need to run and invest in.
I couldn't agree less with your statements. I think the year of the voice was great! Is it perfect absolutely not but it's miles ahead from where it was and having an open source solution is amazing. It's not perfect for sure and I'm sure it will only get better over time
I really appreciate not making it look better than it is. I am very excited for this, I had a feeling the first iteration would need some work.
I'm glad you see how we keep it real on this channel. That is my number one goal to be unbiased in all my videos and tell things like it is. It isn't the best stance for views and clickbait stuff but its the type of videos I would want to see.
I saw a few others on this same subject from bigger channels already. Goes to show you though the big issue I have with YT vids. Once you get into it as you require it for revenue and to pay your bills, you have to fake everything and say it is all the best ever stuff, you have to take any paying contract that will come your way and basically be a sell out. You can't be real and tell it like it is.
I enjoy the aspect of being able to just say it like it is and have zero plans to change.
Looking forward to future development on the hardware and one day see it used full time in my household.
You’re the few reviewers who indeed show the reality of the device state instead of hyping it up like others; as users who want to pay for this kind of things, we deserve a real state of things so we can decide if we want it as it is or not
I tell it like it is in my reviews as always. No paid influence stuff to get in the way. I have had some vendors hate it but some appreciate it and correct their mistakes. Those are the stand up ones!
This box is a good start but definitely needs some work before it can be used. Only one direction to go from here.
They're just lucky Travis wouldn't let me throw that thing from frustration while recording "he still needed it".
Shows how much money Google and Amazon poured into getting their voice assistants working so well so early on.
Very true. The Google speaker I used was from 2016.
I mean if you're whole argument is "I'm in the Google ecosystem and I don't want to change" then it never had a chance.
Nope. I want to go local with an open source box.
I bought mine.
Even though it's not the best voice solution it's the only one that respects the user's privacy and also the only one that will work offline.
I run home assistant on beefy hardware that handles the voice stuff fairly well.
Also smart speakers like Google home and Alexa are subsidize because they gather a lot of information about you.
I appreciate your honest review as always!! ❤️
I appreciate the honest review. I realize this is an alfa/bata product… but that part aside even after they get most the bugs worked out of it, the hardware and use case for this type of off the shelf product, isn’t worth more than $29.99 & thats being generous in my opinion.
Even if it's true you are also supporting an open source company and it's developers.
I pay nabu casa's subscription because I want to support the home assistant project not because they offer something that i can't do myself
@ I agree supporting devs is good. My thought is if it wasn’t the home assessment devs selling this it’d only be worth $10. At $30 2/3would go to the devs. Since this is a product that has use cases where multiples in a system actually makes the product needs to be priced to entice people to want to purchase 6 or 12. They’ll sell more and make more in the long run. But at $60 a pop people may by 1 to support the dev. But theres no way in hell any one will purchase them in quantity at $60 when theres tons of less expensive options with the same ability. In my opinion they’re looking at the short game not the long game.
@mumbles1justin I bought 3.
Two for myself and another one as a gift for a friend for the holidays.
Also prices go down with scale and distribution.
Since this was a fairly small production it was more expensive.
FYI they were sold out everywhere in minutes so I guess a lot of people feel the price is worth it
@ Like I said just my opinion
Wow, who knew there's a voice assistant worse than Siri.
what motorized blinds do you use?
I'm using Smartwings 100% blackout Zigbee roller shades - amzn.to/41Kl7Nb
Thank you beta testers. It’ll be ready next year. I’ll purchase mine then.
I just dont want google mics in my house. 🤷♂️
Would be interested in seeing how it performs with a local llama. I dont mind paying for local processing if it is good.
I think the bigger issue is the waking up and then trying to process it. LLM kinda comes third on that part once they get step 1 and 2 done.
@digiblurDIY true, but if they get that sorted, its a pretty good option. I agree it’s basically an expensive mic, but I would love to have locally processed home automation controlled by voice.
Thanks for the review! Enjoy your holidays ❤️
Yep. Definitely will keep my eye on future updates of it.
It's the infamous red ring of death!
My problem with voice is it takes six seconds to process a command. If they can get that down to a couple of seconds without having to buy a quantum conouter I'd be all in.
I'm guessing you'll need some big hardware. I tried the others on the i7-14700k setup and it seemed just okay, but I didn't have the big gaming GPU to run the LLM stuff
How do you get Google next speakers on a discount!? I would like to try as well
Showing $50 on their store here and you get money back too if you have Google One. store.google.com/product/nest_audio?hl=en-US
@digiblurDIY I had no idea and been a Google one subscriber for years! Thank you!
The Nest Audios are great. I have them as a pair in my office so it turns into Left and Right channels when I stream music. Nice little punch for those things.
@@digiblurDIY looking to do something similar. Do they experience voice delay if I have them as a pair for my Chromecast?
I haven't had that issue. They act like normal. The pair comes up as a speaker group/device.
I have a couple of Wyoming satellites, which are the same as this thing (cost me like 35-40 dls to build each): really dumb, and the wake work even fires itself; from what I've seen you need to add an LLM for the assistant to really work and understand, but there's 2 camps for that: either use ChatGPT or OLlama, so either you send your data to ooenAI or you use a beefy GPU
The cool thing though is that this one has a media player integrated, while on the Wyoming sat you need to install snapcast
The rabbit hole starts to get deep for the typical user running HA there. Many simply do not have the hardware to run that combined with many do not want the power costs to run all that locally.
@digiblurDIY yeah.... definitely the whole voice assistant thing is niche and not ready for the vast majority of users
@Lusanagi my friend just bought one earlier off Seeed after they sent their email out. He's definitely in the vast sea of average Joe users. Not sure what to think or say at this point.
Another great video! Maybe the Nabu does go well on the U7Pro. 😂
I made sure it wasn't using the U7 AP during this test otherwise it would have been twice as bad.
It obviously needs work. If it was $9.99 I might consider getting one just for testing, but $60 ????
The Seeedstudio Respeaker one is a bit cheaper.
Loved the review. What it showed me was that google is better than my Alexa’s! Never been able to get them to control my smart stuff properly. Played with the other HA voice assistants linked to ChatGPT and they are slow but do a much better job of controlling devices without getting the name perfectly matched. Maybe the new device works better with cloud LLMs but that sort of negates the point.
Anyway buying one as it’s geeky tech 😀
I do have an Alexa or two around but we mostly use the Google stuff for the easy casting, google photos, YT music stuff. It is pretty impressive the stuff it understands at times. They can go through phases of dumbing stuff down but then the devs must seem to fix or reverse something at times. Like for a week a few months ago it had no idea what the word shades were.
I've only used the phone app a few times for voice. I can find most entities faster than I could even ask Google anyway.
I'm big on automations myself but sometimes I need to change a couple minor things here and there and forget where I put my phone for the 50th time of the day.
@digiblurDIY that can be an issue for sure.
Nabu fail a lot 😄
It has been pretty entertaining.
You should have used AI fallback it would have answered stuff like weather
I set it up with the HA Cloud like the main stream users would have using Nabu Casa on their Green, Yellow, Pi, etc.
@@digiblurDIY Paulus and the team said this hardware is for developers working on improving voice and is not intended for "main stream" users, which is why it's called "Preview Edition". The website actually says the device is to "develop this community-driven and private voice assistant".
Is it not being sold to users on websites for HA?
The Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, is the first voice assistant built to seamlessly integrate with Home Assistant. This open source, privacy-focused device has advanced audio processing all contained in a premium design that blends into the home.
Holiday Special Offers on Home Assistant Voice! Check the features section of this page for details.
@@digiblurDIY I can't find that quote anywhere on the Home Assistant website, but maybe I am bad at looking.
On the product page it says "We’re launching Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition to help accelerate our goal of not only matching the capabilities of existing voice assistants but surpassing them".
There is also a section on the product page called "Why Preview Edition" that explains this is not intended for mainstream users.
I understand you got your hardware before these pages were up, so I understand your POV, especially if Nabu Casa was not clear in their communication, but the product page is very clear that this is not intended for mainstream users.
My point isn't that you are wrong about the way you use it or that you should go easy on it, but that you are presenting that this is not ready for mainstream without also presenting that that is the intention. This is a "Preview" product and if you are not a developer you should not buy it at this stage.
that new low power Nvidia AI board thing is promising.
it would be nice to have that device loaded with HAOS and use its AI power for this stuff. Assistant on HA is too dumb to be called assistant to be honest.
I almost pulled the trigger on it but saw it was a bit limited with only 8GB
Nabu is no where near good enough to be even a manageable alternative, and it utterly disappointing because A- you chose the OLDEST google home device to pit it against along with the rotted state of google assistant and it still failed hard and B- given said state of google assistant i was hoping that this would be a jumping off point...
YUP! That trusty old original Google Home is still alive and doing well!
The “year of the voice” was a flop. Making it worse, the world discovered LLM’s as chat GPT blew up during that same year. People become instantly accustomed to what that new tech can do, instantly rendering their hard work nearly obsolete. Many of us wish Alexa and Google had synthetic neurons making them smarter which both have been actively working on (likely with a cost). Those people certainly don’t want to use a device (local or not) that’s a worse user experience. Local models are great but like many, my hardware struggles. The integrations just isn’t there yet and the models everyone chooses to specifically train are usually genetic, ‘fully aligned’ llama models for HA which are too censored for my taste. They also struggle with HA in comparison to OAI. I want my assistant running on totally unrestrained and uncensored models, not only comprehending my basic requests but I want it to speak like my family or I do and use “naughty” or “four letter” words, be funny and even ultra sarcastic when I feel like it. I want my assistant to ridicule me for asking a basic math question or bust my balls by calling me a lazy aśś when I ask it to turn on the fan or dryer. I want it to say things like “you better clean that ass” when I ask it to turn in the shower. If, I Initiate the “romantic” scene I want it to make a joke about getting lucky and when I change the scene back, I want it to criticize me for “being too quick” . I also want my assistant to be able to help my family set up quick and easy automations automagically. They should be able to say “hey [wake word] can you set the kitchen light to come on at 4PM each night except weekends” with follow up questions that are necessary to build a good automation. I want my assistant to automatically notice that my coffee pot is still on because the safety timer automation was accidentally turned off. To recognize areas or understand presence. If I say turn of the fan while in the bathroom it should know I’m in the bathroom then respond with “are you sure? It smells like shιτ in here” while it executes the command on the proper fan. I want it to seriously question someone if they ask for something, stupid, strange or dangerous like setting the thermostat to 90°, turning the washer on after it just stoped, or using amperage nearing a breakers capacity if someone recently requested a space heater to come on. I want it to recognize that window is opened or left opened when it’s 18° outside without writing automations. If i ask my assistant to talk dirty to me or to tell me how to make crack, it better sound like a Jenna Jameson in her prime or have me grabbing the pot and baking soda as I’m an adult and don’t need PG 13 restrictions. Life is too boring. If I’m feeling insecure, I want my assistant to tell me that I’m so sexy it could just *** **** ***** me, to make me feel better about myself. Then when my wife interacts with it, it lets her know I’m feeling down and she should “cheer me up”. Extra Hyperbolic example but still….y’all get the picture. I’m my mother in laws phone is detected on the network I want it to say brace yourself Susie’s here. If I say “add larger jeans to the shopping list” , I want my assistant to ask if I’m just a fat aśś eating too much or if my package is finally growing!
Paulus and the HA/NABU team have always pushed back against LLM’s and AI. Years ago he even said that they didn’t see any worthy use case for HA. They recently tried playing the environmental card to refute its use. I strongly believe that position stems from all their time and investment during the “year of the voice” or (‘multiple’ years of the voice) and what they had originally envisioned.
> Paulus and the HA/NABU team have always pushed back against LLM’s and AI.
No, there was pushing back against using chatgpt to generate answers to questions in the community forum and it is still not allowed. There was never push back against using LLMs in HA and there's plenty of choices for that now.
The rest of your list is simply describing the potential of using llms with an assistant. You aren't going to get this from Google or Amazon. You might get it with a locally running llm that yes, you're going to need to run and invest in.
Feel free to expand their feature set to work as you see fit it is open source after all
I couldn't agree less with your statements.
I think the year of the voice was great! Is it perfect absolutely not but it's miles ahead from where it was and having an open source solution is amazing.
It's not perfect for sure and I'm sure it will only get better over time