With voice assistants in trouble, Home Assistant starts a local alternative
Enlarge / Home Assistant running on a Google Nest Hub, via a wild Chromecast hack. Native hardware like this would be nice. (credit: Home Assistant)
Are cloud-based voice assistants doomed? That seems like an overly dramatic question to ask if you look at the current state of millions of users of Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple's Siri, but we're not so sure about the future. Google and Amazon have backed away from their voice assistants recently, with Amazon firing a big chunk of the Alexa team due to it losing $10 billion a year. Google isn't quite at the "fire everyone" stage, but it is reportedly less interested in supporting the Assistant on third-party devices, which would be a crippling move given Google's extremely small hardware division. Everyone built these systems assuming a revenue stream would come later, but that revenue never came, and it's starting to seem like the bubble is bursting.
One project that has a heavy dependence on Big Tech voice assistants isn't sitting around and waiting for doomsday. The team at Home Assistant is declaring 2023 "Home Assistant's year of Voice." This is basically the leading smart home project saying, "If these cloud voice assistants don't provide Big Tech with a multi-billion dollar revenue stream, that's fine, we'll do it ourselves!" There are a few nascent, open source voice assistant projects out there already, but the Home Assistant team has proven it can manage a big project. It has a huge, thriving community and enough revenue to have full-time employees, making this the new frontrunner for a viable local voice service.
Plus Home Assistant isn't starting from scratch-it went and found what it called the "most promising" open source voice assistant out there, "Rhasspy," and hired the lead developer, Mike Hansen, to work full-time on voice in Home Assistant. Hasen will now work at Nabu Casa, the Home Assistant's commercialization company. According to Home Assistant's founder, Paulus Schoutsen, "Rhasspy stands out from other open source voice projects because Mike doesn't focus on just English. Instead, his goal is to make it work for everyone. This is going great as Rhasspy supports already 16 different languages today." The plan is to support all 62 languages the Home Assistant currently supports, but with voice, all without needing an Internet connection.