“As it stands today, we’re not ready yet to tell people that our voice assistant is a replacement for Google/Amazon,” Schoutsen wrote. “We don’t have to be as good as their systems, but there is a certain bar of usable that we haven’t reached yet.”
Key among the improvements that need to happen, according to Schoutsen:
- Audio input needs to be cleaned up (speaker voice separated) before it is processed
- Error messages need to be more clear about what’s going wrong, and input has to have more flexibility
- Non-English languages need a lot of commands and variables
- Compatible hardware that features far-listening microphones has to be more widely available
- Most people will want local processing to be faster
https://heywillow.io/ seems to solve the voice recognition pretty well. I don’t know how good the home automation integration is, though.
Honestly, just having it call out to a script would be plenty to interest me. I could rig it up to search YouTube for music or something and get a ton of value out of it.