Tuesday, April 29, 2025

HomeAssistant Voice Preview Edition poweron

I powered on two HomeAssistant Voice Preview Edition devices, trying to replace our use of Google Home. It is set up self-hosted in a HomeAssistant VM, running on a quite old Dell T320 server running Proxmox. It is an E5-2450 v2 with 8 cores and 20MB cache at 2.5 GHz. The HA-OS VM gets two of those cores.

Pros:

  • has an announce function, one of the most common things we use Google Home for. Yes, we use Google Home primarily as an overly complicated intercom.
  • entirely self-hosted, voice doesn't leave the home

Cons: haven't yet figured out the other common things we use Google Home for.

  • set timer for N minutes
  • play music from YouTube
  • recurring alarms every weekday/Thursdays/etc