Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers

Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers(omgubuntu.co.uk)

40 points by edward 1 hour ago | 9 comments

I'm half surprised they are still around as they seem to never restock most of their products, and half pleased they are still around and releasing products.

joshstrange 1 hour ago |

I’ll wait for the reviews. I bought the Home Assistant Voice Preview device and it was underwhelming. Bad speaker, bad mic, bad pickup. I really wanted to like it but my Echo blew it out of the water.

I’m deep into the HA system so I cannot wait for Echo-quality that I can attach to my HA.

simonmales 41 minutes ago |

Would love for Pine64 to thrive.

I don't own any of their products, but I am glad they exist.

lostmsu 20 minutes ago |

Does this device allow raw access to the microphone array? Considering the SoC I might want to stream it elsewhere for processing. How many independent channels does the array provide?

amelius 1 hour ago |

Does this use _local_ processing of voice commands?

segbrk 1 hour ago | |

This is just a satellite device for Home Assistant (self-hosted) which you can set up to do processing however you’d like. There are cloud options for each stage of the pipeline (speech to text, LLM to turn text into tool calls, text to speech), but there are local options for all of that: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_loc...

rjsw 1 hour ago | |

My reading of the documentation [1] is that everything is local.

[1] https://pine64.org/documentation/PineVoice/Software/

pitchlatte 1 hour ago |

i just wonder how good it sounds. open audiophile grade hardware is something of a gap.

itomato 49 minutes ago | |

It’s an off the shelf SOM.

Audiophiles are safe from this device.