Next month the kitchen is getting remodeled and I volunteered to provide outlets and light switches for the contractors. I need like 13 of each.

My house is one foot in home assistant and one foot in google and I’m looking for both specific and general advice. I’ve done mostly Kasa HS200 switches so far in my house but I just installed my first [Enbrighten switch](Enbrighten 43080 Zigbee in-Wall… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08428GDS8) and it seems good, but it’s underutilized because either I use the switch or I have to go dig in the HA app, and it isn’t convenient yet.

Here’s the deal:

I’ve got some door sensors, I’ve got HVAC, I’ve got doorbell and deadbolt (kind of), I’ve got zigbee smart blinds, and then a butt load of kasa switches and zigbee third reality wall warts and stuff. All the automations I’ve made are hands off. I don’t have any crossover between Google and home assistant (I understand there IS an integration) but I want to do this right.

  • Should I be doing probably one zigbee switch per room in the remodel (pantry, kitchen, laundry, mudroom) and then kasa? Then eventually move over to full HA?

  • I am struggling to figure out how to help the family switch away from Google to HA, but maybe I want to mask HA with Google? We are using the hub max displays around the house and I’m not sure how to pass control without posting dashboards (which I haven’t made) to the Google displays.

Sorry this is rambling, but what should I be thinking about here and how do I take next steps to ungoogle the house? I feel like instead of gobbling random stuff together like I have been doong I have an opportunity to make a commitment, but if I choose wrong it’s like a $1k+ mistake at $50 per switch/outlet.

  • chaospatterns@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    20 hours ago

    I’d love for my HA Voice Preview to be sufficient to replace my Alexa/Google devices. I even unplugged my Alexa devices. However, it’s been rough going for me. It never responds to my girlfriend speaking the wake word and doesn’t set timers. There’s a number of knobs that define how well it works including the physical hardware (there’s obviously the Voice Preview, but also some community made versions with better mics,) wake word model, conservation LLM model and the speech to text model (whisper vs speech to phrase). If it works well for you, can you share your configuration you’re using?

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      19 hours ago

      I’m using the HA PE hardware. The wake word sensitivity is set to max. I’m currently using the default Home Assistant (Nabu Casa) cloud STT and TTS. I’m using Qwen 8b running on Ollama via the Ollama HA integration. It runs on my main computer on the same network. I’ve tested local STT and TTS and it works great. The only reason I’m currently using the cloud one is that there’s a specific voice that sounded good for a Santa Claus assistant for the holidays. We haven’t encountered significant issues with the wakeword. Gotta yell louder sometimes. It activates from the TV sometimes. Speech recognition is pretty flawless. Neither me or my wife is a native English speaker but we don’t have super heavy accents.

      The one thing that made it great was the addition of the LLM. With it I don’t have to remember the exact names of devices or the correct phrasing to get HA to do what I want. It also allows for multiple actions in a single instruction. Since it’s an LLM you could also ask it to do LLM things. Like give you a semi-accurate fact or do basic math wrong:

      If you’d like to know specifics, ask.