Say goodbye to Google, Siri, and Alexa: Home Assistant now offers its own voice control

A new voice assistant for Home Assistant will handle the fundamental tasks of controlling smart home devices.

Paulus Schoutsen, the founder of Home Assistant, the open-source smart home platform, recently announced in a blog post that his company is developing a new voice assistant. Unlike other assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, this new voice assistant will be able to handle all local voice commands for controlling smart devices without relying on a cloud connection. The release date for this new voice assistant is targeted for 2023.

One of the primary goals of Home Assistant's new voice assistant is to support multiple languages. The user interface for the Home Assistant app already supports 62 languages, and the company hopes that the community will assist in making all of them voice-enabled.

Initially, the Home Assistant voice product will not have the capabilities of a typical smart speaker, such as web searches, making calls, or playing voice games. Voice assistants often have internet-connected "smart" functions that are useful for tasks like answering trivia questions or checking sports scores, but these abilities can be unnecessary if all you need is a smart home controller. Apple's Siri is known to be the easiest and fastest voice assistant for home commands, but it requires an internet connection to work. Home Assistant's solution will be completely local, allowing it to work without an internet connection.

In the future, Home Assistant may also use its own voice assistant to control devices on its platform, as it has gained Matter support and has a text-based speech recognition feature called "conversation integration." The company is also gathering command sentences in a new "intents repository" to help the community program their own actions.