It feels like it's the economics holding it back at this point.
I cobbled together my own smart home voice assistant on a weekend a few weeks ago, sitting on top of the OpenAI APIs (Whisper, GPT-4), and of course using porcupine for wake word detection.
It can do things I could never get the commercial products to do properly, for example I gave it a memory: When a user command comes in, I have GPT-4 evaluate whether it can be executed immediately or requires later follow-up. When a sensor event happens, the machinery re-prompts GPT-4 with the user command backlog, the sensor backlog and the current state, and it figures things out. That way, things like "Please turn of the lights after I leave the room" now work just fine, and all it takes is an afternoon of hacking and a PIR sensor on my little DIY Homebrew-lexa wood boxes. And of course it's also much better at interpreting natural language commands "in spirit" or "creatively".
I'm sure Amazon, Google & Apple have made all of these tinkering experiments, too, but deploying LLM-backed voice services to tens of millions just isn't affordable yet, especially when you factor in risk and liability.
I cobbled together my own smart home voice assistant on a weekend a few weeks ago, sitting on top of the OpenAI APIs (Whisper, GPT-4), and of course using porcupine for wake word detection.
It can do things I could never get the commercial products to do properly, for example I gave it a memory: When a user command comes in, I have GPT-4 evaluate whether it can be executed immediately or requires later follow-up. When a sensor event happens, the machinery re-prompts GPT-4 with the user command backlog, the sensor backlog and the current state, and it figures things out. That way, things like "Please turn of the lights after I leave the room" now work just fine, and all it takes is an afternoon of hacking and a PIR sensor on my little DIY Homebrew-lexa wood boxes. And of course it's also much better at interpreting natural language commands "in spirit" or "creatively".
I'm sure Amazon, Google & Apple have made all of these tinkering experiments, too, but deploying LLM-backed voice services to tens of millions just isn't affordable yet, especially when you factor in risk and liability.