Home Assistant

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/aevans0001 on 2026-07-12 20:28:50+00:00.

I’m looking for an Alexa-type device that is not Alexa, and I’m curious what hardware people are actually using successfully right now.

My needs are fairly simple:

• Reliable wake-word detection and good microphones

• Home Assistant voice control

• Ability to play my own music library

• Compact enough to place near our pool

• It will be under cover and kept dry, so it does not necessarily need to be waterproof

• Decent music quality, or the ability to connect it to a better external speaker

My music library is stored on an Unraid server and available through Plex. I’m open to setting up Music Assistant if that is the best route.

My biggest frustration with Alexa is that it misses or misunderstands commands far too often. I do not want to replace Alexa with something that requires me to stand two feet away, yell slowly, or repeat every command three times.

I found this older discussion about the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition:

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1jku1fe/alright_guys_be_honest_is_the_voice_preview/

A lot of the complaints were about poor microphone pickup, low speaker volume, slow responses, and difficulty hearing commands while music or a TV was playing.

For people currently using the Voice Preview Edition:

1. Have the microphone and wake-word issues improved through software or firmware updates?
2. How far away can it reliably hear you at normal speaking volume?
3. Can it hear commands while music is playing?
4. Is it reliable enough for family members who do not want to troubleshoot it?
5. How well does it work with Music Assistant and a personal Plex music library?
6. Are you using its built-in speaker, an external powered speaker, or a separate media player?

I’m also interested in what people are using instead of Voice PE. Satellite1, ReSpeaker, ESPHome devices, Raspberry Pi setups, or anything else that is reliable and does not look like a science project sitting on the counter.

What hardware are you using, how reliable is it, and would you buy the same setup again?

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/i533 on 2026-07-12 18:31:29+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/GenericUser104 on 2026-07-12 21:55:28+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/plump-lamp on 2026-07-12 21:16:28+00:00.

Running out of creativity. Looking for some new ideas on some cool devices you integrated with HA. I've got all the basics, switches, vacuums, cars, thermostats, leak sensors, door sensors. Looking for something new

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/vlycop on 2026-07-12 18:00:19+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/antisane on 2026-07-12 14:42:27+00:00.

Latest version 2.9.8

[2.9.8] - 12.07.2026

No changes

Huh? Why push an update if nothing has changed?

Don't get me wrong, I love MA, I use it every day by voice control through my PEs, but the sheer amount of updates is driving me crazy... And now an update with no changes?

https://preview.redd.it/qd4yszjd9tch1.png?width=563&format=png&auto=webp&s=c6bacfd0bc749c795ccdab7277914482b2166b65

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/rgnyldz on 2026-07-12 20:44:47+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Winter-Select on 2026-07-12 13:22:44+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Equivalent_Sun2305 on 2026-07-12 14:20:49+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/AlcatrazTN on 2026-07-12 14:42:04+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/SlowDragonfruit9718 on 2026-07-12 13:08:13+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Kindly_Club8835 on 2026-07-12 10:51:57+00:00.

Finally got around to flashing an ESP8266 wired into my old window unit's IR receiver and it actually works. Full control in HA, temperature sensor reporting back, automations based on presence and time of day. Took a weekend of frustration but it clicked.

Now I'm sitting here looking at every dumb appliance in my apartment differently. The box fan. The space heater. The rice cooker I definitely do not need automating but am absolutely considering.

What surprised me was how well ESPHome handles the IR codes. I half expected to spend days reverse engineering the remote, but the climate component had most of it already. The harder part was mounting everything neatly so it doesn't look like a science experiment bolted to the wall.

The presence detection angle is what really got me. Having the AC turn off when nobody's home and precool before someone arrives sounds simple, but it actually saves a noticeable amount on the electric bill. Been running it for about three weeks now.

Curious if anyone has gone further with window units specifically, like integrating current monitoring to track actual power draw alongside the thermostat. I threw a basic smart plug on it but the reporting feels coarse. Wondering if there's a cleaner way to handle that without adding another device into the mix.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Maccoy_Chetna on 2026-07-12 11:17:29+00:00.

I'm not expecting my fridge to do everything, but it would be nice if I could pull useful information into Home Assistant instead of just opening another phone app. even simple notifications would be enough for me.

What are you all using, and are you happy with how it integrates? I'd rather hear real experiences. thanks!

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/LeighAdelaide on 2026-07-12 03:35:11+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/carrot_gg on 2026-07-12 04:13:59+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/bsquared7999 on 2026-07-11 19:42:39+00:00.

I just finished watching Paul Hibbert's latest video and he was making some good points about the Ikea devices. It got me to thinking about some of the Ikea devices I have and I thought I would poll the community what are the best Ikea devices you have in HA? I also have a question about the MYGGSPRAY (not in his video) motion detector if anyone has used it, their opinion and is it a PIR sensor, mm wave. So I will kick this off my favorite Ikea device is the STYRBAR remote it interfaces well with HA and the 4 buttons give me lots of options to work controlling any objects in HA, and for $14 it is pretty inexpensive. Your thoughts on Ikea devices.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Thokoop on 2026-07-12 01:13:30+00:00.

Based on a request from a fellow-Redditor I have added a two new features: local knowledge and status led.

You can now add custom pdf, excel or text files to Billy for him to use and process in his responses when applicable for the topic of the conversation. You can add files to different folders which each has it’s own trigger topics, so that Billy knows when to look for which local files.

Status led support makes it possible to have an extra visual indicator on Billy’s status. I thought it’s kind of funny to put it where it’s brain would be but of course you could also put it in the housing itself.

As always you can find the build instructions for free here:

https://github.com/Thokoop/billy-b-assistant

If you have any ideas for extra / new features please feel free to let me know and I’d be happy to look into it!

Other release notes of v2.3.0:

This release also adds local openWakeWord support, alongside the existing Porcupine option. It now adds xAI/Grok as a realtime voice provider to the ui, with provider and model selection now available from the web dashboard.

The web UI has been reorganized into separate pages, with updated navigation and a clearer layout for setup and configuration. Wi-Fi setup is now part of the main web UI, including network scanning, manual SSID entry, Wi-Fi country selection, and an improved onboarding flow

There are also new hardware-related settings for optional WS2812B status LEDs, camera rotation, and microphone gain persistence. The microphone test screen has been improved with live RMS values, rolling average, peak levels, and short recording playback.

A new startup mic pre-buffer should reduce missed speech right after Billy wakes up. There are also reliability fixes for motor GPIO cleanup, mic threshold consistency, repeated camera tool calls, and a double-press button shortcut to stop an active session.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/marrecar on 2026-07-11 11:17:20+00:00.

My HA setup is years old now. In the meantime, I have gathered and installed, imported and created many things, including trying to replicate dashboards - which means importing random files in random directories and creating dashboards as pure yaml, etc.

Because of this, through the years I have installed various resources, cards, add-ons, and so on. But now I am at the point where, when I want to add a new card, I get a massive list of cards with previews that slow down the scrolling and it looks all so messy because some cards have different sizes and categories. Then there's also modded cards through custom dashboards, and so on.

I want to clean everything up, but not install a brand new system and add everything back. I thought about running parallel systems, but I read many comments about devices getting confused, etc.

To avoid all that, I want to clean my current system. It's not slow, it's working perfectly, but working on the system itself is exhausting because I made a mess of it. Now I don't even know which layout card is the right one, did I remove the original one when I added the modified one, and stuff like that. I even encountered an "issue" a few days ago, when I deleted custom repositories from HACS before deleting the addons, and now the addons don't even appear on my installed list - and I can't even remember which repositories I deleted.

Is there any reasonable way to do this? Cleaning up the entities is not a problem, but everything else is. I will do it even manually, I just haven't figured out the best way yet.

Thanks!

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/NarrowStudios on 2026-07-11 17:47:26+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Naked-Head on 2026-07-11 13:13:15+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Earhythmic on 2026-07-11 03:03:54+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/hometechgeek on 2026-07-11 12:01:33+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/cmdr-rentadeath on 2026-07-11 08:38:24+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/tristanbrotherton on 2026-07-11 02:40:51+00:00.

I am an avid user of home assistant and openclaw. I have a few Voice PE's and was never really happy with the user-experiance. After building a voice / phone plugin for Open Claw recently i decided voice was fun and I decided to fix this. I looked at other work but nothing quite hit the feature set i was going for. The result is honestly the assistant I always wanted. Repos at the bottom — it's two halves, ESPHome firmware + an HA add-on.

What it does now:

• True speech-to-speech. No STT→LLM→TTS chain — replies are generated as speech, so it sounds like conversation using OpenAI's real-time API. Smart-home control goes through HA's native tools and is instant. Persona is fully promptable; mine is a dry British butler.

• Custom wake word, trained on us. I say "hey leonard." The firmware ships a microWakeWord model trained on ~50k voices. Detection margin improved 65% over three training passes.

• It knows who's talking. Say "teach me my voice" and the device runs a guided enrollment session (mic pinned open, audio coach walks you through it, everything stays local). Speaker embeddings then identify each of us by name on every wake — it greets me by name, as well as my wife, and treats unknown voices as guests. Certain tools are locked to my voice only.

• It learns from its mistakes. Every wake capture is archived locally. False trigger? Say "that was a false alarm" or just double-press the button. A weekly job retrains the wake word on exactly those failures, quality-gates the result against the current model, stages it (never auto-flashes), and texts me (via openclaw) — I reply to deploy, or roll back with one command if a model misbehaves.

• The domestic stuff: voice timers that ring on-device, HA sensors for who's-speaking / active timers / daily false-wake counts, and errors are LED-only — no more "cloud unavailable" announcements waking the house at 3 am. A ton of quality / UX improvements.

Almost everything — enrollment, labeling, retraining, notifications — was built because something annoyed me. The false-wake flywheel exists because it interrupted breakfast.

Built on the shoulders of xandervanerven's and fjfricke's realtime work and the official ESPHome firmware — credits in the repos:

• Backend: https://github.com/TristanBrotherton/voicepe-realtime-backend

• Firmware: https://github.com/TristanBrotherton/voicepe-realtime-firmware

Happy to answer questions.

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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Jmaack23 on 2026-07-10 17:33:14+00:00.