Home Assistant has a chat function built into its smart home operating system where users can give smart home commands. That should be a first step towards an integrated voice assistant. The function, Assist, supports 22 languages .
The new feature is called Home Assistant Assist and is available in version 2023.2 of the OS. The developers write that the assistant can be invoked with a special icon in the corner of the system. Assist also works on Android Watch watches and on Apple via Siri.
With Assist, users can have a limited number of tasks performed by Home Assistant in normal language. For example, they can ask to turn lights on and off or set them to a certain position and to regulate the temperature for smart thermostats. Those tasks are based on what the developers call Intents. This is a public list of commonly used smart home commands that are then translated into other languages by the community. Currently Assist supports 22 languages, including Dutch, French and German.
The Intents database is loaded locally. Users can add their own sentences by, for example, changing the trigger word or by loading their own scripts and scenes with a trigger word, for example.
Users can choose to use an external language model instead of the local one Intents. Google Assistant and OpenAI’s GPT-3 are currently supported for that. At Google, the same commands can be given as users can already do when they link their Home Assistant installation. With GPT-3, no smart home commands can be entered, but users can communicate directly with the language bot from Home Assistant.
The developers say that Assist is a first step towards their own voice assistant. Home Assistant previously said that it wants to focus more on voice and voice control in 2023. The makers say they want to integrate speech-to-text and text-to-speech in Assist as the next step, but it is not yet known when that will be ready. Home Assistant can be controlled via voice assistants such as Alexa or Google Assistant, but that is still done via the servers of those companies. It is also possible to link alternative external voice assistants, such as the local Almond or Ada.
