Still walking with a crutch because of my ankle :/ This whole thing started last week Friday, so I feel like it should be healing faster, thinking about visiting my GP to take a look.

But I must say all the OpenAI Drama (check /c/technology if you missed it) is actually amusing me quite a bit, so that’s helping.

Some great personal news, a project that has been in various stages of planning since early 2020, but until recently never advanced much beyond that is finally happening:

Got the last part for my Alexa-Replacement prototype yesterday, the cheap USB speaker. So now I have a PI Zero 2W with a speaker and a microphone array, streaming audio to my Home Assistant setup, which does wake word detection and everything else.

Right now I can turn the lights on/off (built-in feature), and ask for the weather using my own outdoor sensor (requires only templating), but I’m also currently writing code to enable me to do unit conversions from American fantasy units to real units. I only need a few ingredients for volume to weight, hard and soft cheese, flour, and butter, so it’s not too much work, and other units are then just straight conversions.

I already tested that it can stop playing music upon detecting the wake word. After that I need to set up timers which seems a bit clunky by default, so it might require some custom code as well. Right now, I’m using Nabu Casa cloud (the company for the open source project Home Assistant) for STT, TTI, TTS audio processing (as I’m paying them anyway, mostly to support them), but the J4105 CPU HA is running on should be powerful enough to do all that on device to be completely local and internet independent. I’ll then also experiment with doing wakeword detection on the Pi Zero instead of the main server and see if that improves latency.

Once everything is done, I’ll replace the kitchen echo, and start getting the parts to replace the living room and bedroom echo dot (the bedroom one will also need a time display with auto-brightness, that might take some work), and then I’ll finally have local voice control.

The current look is not amazing, but in the kitchen and living room, I can hide everything but the speaker and microphone, and for the bedroom I’ll need a different solution anyway because of the screen.