Voice Assistant

Voice assistants are how most people actually interact with their smart home. Nobody wants to open an app to turn off a light - you just say "hey Google, living room off" and it happens. The technology listens for a wake word, processes your speech, figures out what you meant, and triggers the right devices. Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri dominate the market, each tied to their respective ecosystems.

The AI upgrade: Voice assistants used to be glorified keyword matchers - say the right phrase, get the right action. That's changing fast. Amazon's Alexa+, Google's Gemini integration, and Apple's evolving Siri are bringing large language models into the mix. Now you can say "it's too bright in here" instead of "set living room lights to 40%" and the assistant figures it out. Home Assistant users aren't left out - you can connect to cloud LLMs or run models locally via Ollama, giving your voice assistant genuine reasoning abilities without a big tech middleman.

The privacy trade-off: Cloud processing is fast and accurate, but your voice travels to external servers. All the major players now offer deletion controls and retention limits. For the privacy-conscious, local voice processing (Home Assistant's Voice PE, Piper) is finally viable - it handles common commands well, though complex queries still favor cloud AI. Pick your balance: maximum smarts with cloud, maximum privacy with local, or mix both depending on the query.