Home smart assistant, which one?

[Acuity31]

From Echo to Nest to Alexa. Which is the one to go for?
I've also read rumblings of a new AI assistant in the works which will make all these current ones old hat.
I'm basically looking for something that I can plonk in one room and it can hear me throughout most of the house, and will do basic tasks like turn lights on and off, tell me the time, tell me the weather, local traffic, set reminders and timers etc. Without breaking the bank.
Currently all my smart devices run off the Google Home app on my phone which is less than ideal. Though the app does use Gemini now so it's pretty intelligent.

[ARH]

You will have trouble using a voice assistant from anywhere in your house if you only have one. Unless your house is really small. To have reall success you will need one every 15m or so apart if in different rooms.

If you have an amount of background noise, this will be even worse, if you have a room with people talking voice control can be difficult.

I do not like voice control for these reasons, I have it and use it occasionally but my smart home is controlled by automations, far easier than shouting at a speaker across the other side of a room and hoping it understands you and not the TV. This is just my opinion though

[RizzoTheRat]

If you are interested in playing with the Tech, Home Assistant now has a natural language processing AI feature called Assist that you can either run on your own hardware on in a cloud.

Dunno about Google Home, but I have multiple Alexa's scattered around the house, and have specific voice commands set up, but it doesn't use natural language processing, ie I have to say the specific command "Alexa, Lounge On". If I say "Alexa, turn the lounge lights on" it won't work because that's not a preprogramed command. In theory Assist, or other AI tools, should be smart enough to work out that a sentence contains the words Lounge, Lights, and On and get on with it. Newer Alexa units have a Zigbee hub built in so can be used to directly control lights or switches, but I have everything through Home Assistant and just use voice prompts via Alexa to HA for some things.
Google assistant is definitely better than Alexa at understanding internet search requests so it may have a better language ability, if you're curretnly runing stuff form the google phone app, I'd have thought a few google home devices in the house should link in to the same system.

[ARH]

I am not sure Home assistant is a good recommendation for someone who needs to ask about assistants. No offence to the OP,but it is hardly the the best place to start out with home automation unless you are a keen tinkerer, and a capable computer user.

And this is from someone who has used HA for 7 years, and actively participates in Beta testing of various voice and media setups using Esphome.

HA voice although it works well, it is not nearly as polished as Alexa or google, and certainly not a place to start with voice.

[Acuity31]

RizzoTheRat said:

If you are interested in playing with the Tech, Home Assistant now has a natural language processing AI feature called Assist that you can either run on your own hardware on in a cloud.

Dunno about Google Home, but I have multiple Alexa's scattered around the house, and have specific voice commands set up, but it doesn't use natural language processing, ie I have to say the specific command "Alexa, Lounge On". If I say "Alexa, turn the lounge lights on" it won't work because that's not a preprogramed command. In theory Assist, or other AI tools, should be smart enough to work out that a sentence contains the words Lounge, Lights, and On and get on with it. Newer Alexa units have a Zigbee hub built in so can be used to directly control lights or switches, but I have everything through Home Assistant and just use voice prompts via Alexa to HA for some things.
Google assistant is definitely better than Alexa at understanding internet search requests so it may have a better language ability, if you're curretnly runing stuff form the google phone app, I'd have thought a few google home devices in the house should link in to the same system.

Surely Alexa is due an AI update soon because that sounds very limiting if not.
Google Home on my phone uses Gemini AI, so I assume if I buy a google based device it too will use Gemini. With Gemini I can just talk to it like a human and it will follow my commands said in several different ways. No different really to ChatGPT in conversation mode. Just the Gemini voices are a bit jarring imo

Edited by Acuity31 on Monday 2nd March 10:23

[Dashnine]

RizzoTheRat said:

it doesn't use natural language processing, ie I have to say the specific command "Alexa, Lounge On". If I say "Alexa, turn the lounge lights on" it won't work because that's not a preprogramed command.

While I agree Alexa doesn’t use natural language processing, and Google Home is better for search information, I don’t think Alexa is quite as limited as you suggest. If you name it more accurately, eg as ‘Lounge Lamp’ then you can more or less just use ‘Lounge Lamp’ in a sentence and it will work it out and action it.

Additionally, if you think about what you might normally say to turn the light on and off you can also add that to a routine (which you might have coming on or off automatically every day) eg turn the light in the Lounge on or ‘in the lounge, turn the light on’.

[RizzoTheRat]

You got me wondering that too, it looks like they've just rolled out the new Alexa+ AI based setup in the last couple of weeks. I'm using it to control emulated Philips Hue switches and it looks like there's AI stuff able to do that with more natural language so I'll have to look at it.

[Mr.Grimsdale]

I use Siri to tell my Home Assistant to switch lights on and off. It works fine. You just have to remember to take your phone with you when you move around the house.

[Griffith4ever]

I find Echo Dots/ Pops can "hear" you from several rooms away if you try. Mine trigger Home Assistant automations and switches.

[durbster]

I've not tried the newer LLM driven stuff but Google's older smart home stuff is rubbish. Even just getting it to play a radio station can be a lottery.

The Echo devices are quite dumb so I don't bother using voice for controlling stuff but the hardware is impressive. I've got a first-gen echo and even that can hear an instruction from another room at not much more than speaking voice (which is quite scary really )

Mr.Grimsdale said:

I use Siri to tell my Home Assistant to switch lights on and off. It works fine. You just have to remember to take your phone with you when you move around the house.

Hmm, I don't get the point of this. It sounds worse in pretty much every way than using a light switch, which kind of defeats the point.

[RizzoTheRat]

durbster said:

Hmm, I don't get the point of this. It sounds worse in pretty much every way than using a light switch, which kind of defeats the point.

Saves you having to get off the sofa/chair and walk over to the light switch, or have a hand free at the time. Plus you have the ability do multiple things at the same time ("Alexa, Watch TV" turns off all the lights in my house except the lounge which it puts on low. I did have it tuning on the TV as well but that annoys my Mrs for some reason ). However doing it via an in place device like an echo or google home is a lot less hassle than having to get your phone out of your pocket.

[biggiles]

RizzoTheRat said:

If you are interested in playing with the Tech, Home Assistant now has a natural language processing AI feature called Assist that you can either run on your own hardware on in a cloud.

Dunno about Google Home, but I have multiple Alexa's scattered around the house, and have specific voice commands set up, but it doesn't use natural language processing, ie I have to say the specific command "Alexa, Lounge On". If I say "Alexa, turn the lounge lights on" it won't work because that's not a preprogramed command. In theory Assist, or other AI tools, should be smart enough to work out that a sentence contains the words Lounge, Lights, and On and get on with it. Newer Alexa units have a Zigbee hub built in so can be used to directly control lights or switches, but I have everything through Home Assistant and just use voice prompts via Alexa to HA for some things.
Google assistant is definitely better than Alexa at understanding internet search requests so it may have a better language ability, if you're curretnly runing stuff form the google phone app, I'd have thought a few google home devices in the house should link in to the same system.

I think that's a config problem, not an Alexa problem?

For several years (maybe 5+ ? ) our Alexas knows which lights are in the same room, so saying "Alexa, turn the lights off" or, in another room "Alexa turn the kitchen lights off" (or anything vaguely similar to that) will do what I ask. You may need to set up the right "groups" in the Alexa config/app? Our lights are a wide mixture of Zigbee/Hue/Tuya, and we must have over half-a-dozen Alexas/Echos of various vintages.

OP, Alexas work very well. I have friends who also like their Googles... I suspect there are many more Alexas than Googles, but either one is pretty good. Home Assistant is awesome, but the learning curve for the voice commands will be much higher than Alexa/Google's.

Edited by biggiles on Tuesday 3rd March 12:44

Edited by biggiles on Tuesday 3rd March 12:45

[Acuity31]

Did a bit of reading and in spring time Google is releasing a brand new smart assistant designed for Gemini so will achieve faster commands. I'll wait for that. Suspected to cost around £100