I bought a Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition to try out. It's surprisingly good, but still falls short when compared to Google Home speakers:
- Wake word detection isn't as good as the Google Homes (more false positives, more false negatives - so I can't just tune sensitivity).
- Mic and speakers are both of poor quality in comparison to Google Home devices.
- Flow is awkward. On a Google Home device, you can say "Okay Google, turn on the lights" with no pause. On the Voice PE, you have to say "Hey Mycroft [awkward pause while you wait for the acknowledgement noise] turn on the lights" - it seems like the Google Home devices start buffering immediately after the wake word, but the Voice PE doesn't.
- Voice fingerprints don't exist, so this prevents the device from figuring out that two separate people are talking, or who is talking to it.
- The device has poor identification of background noise, so if you talk to it while there is a TV playing speech in the background, it will continue to listen to the speech from the TV. It will eventually transcribe everything you said + everything from the TV and get confused. (This probably folds into the voice print thing as well.)
On the upside, though:
- Setting it up was really easy.
- All of the entities I want to control with it are already available, without needing to export them or set them up separately in Google Home.
- Despite all of the above complaints, the device is probably 80-90% of what I realistically need to use it day-to-day. If they throw a better speaker and mic array in, I'd likely be comfortable replacing all of my Google Homes.
- Wake word detection isn't as good as the Google Homes (more false positives, more false negatives - so I can't just tune sensitivity).
- Mic and speakers are both of poor quality in comparison to Google Home devices.
- Flow is awkward. On a Google Home device, you can say "Okay Google, turn on the lights" with no pause. On the Voice PE, you have to say "Hey Mycroft [awkward pause while you wait for the acknowledgement noise] turn on the lights" - it seems like the Google Home devices start buffering immediately after the wake word, but the Voice PE doesn't.
- Voice fingerprints don't exist, so this prevents the device from figuring out that two separate people are talking, or who is talking to it.
- The device has poor identification of background noise, so if you talk to it while there is a TV playing speech in the background, it will continue to listen to the speech from the TV. It will eventually transcribe everything you said + everything from the TV and get confused. (This probably folds into the voice print thing as well.)
On the upside, though:
- Setting it up was really easy.
- All of the entities I want to control with it are already available, without needing to export them or set them up separately in Google Home.
- Despite all of the above complaints, the device is probably 80-90% of what I realistically need to use it day-to-day. If they throw a better speaker and mic array in, I'd likely be comfortable replacing all of my Google Homes.