@popey@testman Of course, best is a subjective measure so it really depends on your goal. I lean towards #NeonAI as it's more full featured than #OVOS, but YMMV. #HomeAssistant has also made huge strides in the voice arena, and continue to work on it. You can turn an ESP32-S3-Box-3 into a marginally capable assistant if your only goal is to control your smart home. If you want to ask it questions about the weather or actors/politicians then no. Not yet.
@jameswynn Me too! Unfortunately there's not a lot of details available just yet. I don't know if this is something that's going to be more appropriate as a satellite for @homeassistant to use, or if it's going to be capable of running software like #NeonAI or #OVOS. I'd like to see the latter since NeonAI is currently a more capable voice assistant that HomeAssistant (currently), but HomeAssistant is pretty new to the game so there's no guarantees that'll always be the case.
Oh, I really want to build one of these! If I put a Pi4 or Pi5 into it and ran a local copy of #NeonAI or #OVOS and maybe controlled the servos directly from the Pi instead of running it through an extra #Arduino, it would be a lot more capable and compact. Or, I could run it through a Pi0 with a #HomeAssistant assistant setup to offload the hardware requirements. So much potential!! Maybe when I'm done with my class and have more time to tinker around?
This is one of the reasons I've been a big supporter of #Mycroft in the past, and I'm still supporting #OVOS and #NeonAI. I think a voice driven UI (VUI) is important, but the biggest players in that market are Google and Amazon, and their motivation isn't improving the experience for the people using their devices, it's monetizing anything and everything they can. I'd love to see a new smart speaker (cough@PINE64cough) that would support OVOS or NeonAI soon.
Got the new version of #NeonAI installed on my #Mark2. Neon is just a touch too heavy for the hardware in the Mark2. I've heard you can upgrade the Pi to a model with more RAM and supposedly that makes a huge difference. If you can get a Pi. I'm hoping when they get around to a Pi 5 :raspberrypi: it'll keep close enough to the same form factor that it can be dropped into the Mark2. It would be really nice to give it a bit more oomph.
@ggiesen Agreed. Home Assistant integration is a big part of why I wanted one too. I only lost one to Mycroft going under, but still grates. That being said, Neon and OVOS are still developing and #HomeAssistant is really pushing on their "Year of the Voice". I'm hoping that the updates HA makes with the #YearOfTheVoice will make things easier assistants like #NeonAI to integrate. I could be completely wrong about that, but it seems like having some of this stuff built in will ease the load.