This yr is Dwelling Assistant’s yr of the voice. It’s our purpose for 2023 to let customers management Dwelling Assistant in their very own language. At this time, one month into 2023, we begin our first chapter.
At Dwelling Assistant we imagine that know-how is supposed to be performed with, and initiatives ought to be usable as quickly as attainable. Along with the neighborhood we are able to then iterate and refine. That’s why at present, we’re delivering a fundamental expertise for 22 languages to work together with Dwelling Assistant. Oh, and we’re additionally releasing some enjoyable stuff that we cooked up alongside the best way.
To look at the video presentation of this weblog put up, together with dwell demos, test the recording of our live stream.
Intentions
The core of a voice assistant is to be able to understand the intention of a spoken sentence. What is it the user wants to do? To extract these intentions we created our own template sentence matching format and intent recognizer named Hassil.
This new format is utilized by our new Home Assistant Intents mission. The purpose of this mission is to gather dwelling automation sentences in each attainable language. Because it’s begin a month in the past, now we have had 112 individuals contribute. The mission now helps 22 languages and 14 more are in progress.
Assist
We have added a new feature to Home Assistant: 
Assist. It allow users to use natural language to control Home Assistant. It is powered by Hassil and the sentences from the Home Assistant Intent project.
We want Assist to be as accessible to as many people as possible. To do this, we made it work without requiring extra hardware – just update to Home Assistant 2023.2 and you can start! Through a combination of smart algorithms combined with sheer brute force (we are collecting a lot of sentences), we have been able to make a system that works for most common sentences. Support for more powerful, AI-powered, intent recognizers might come in the future as an opt-in feature.
Assist is enabled by default in the Home Assistant 2023.2 release. Tap the new Assist icon at the top right of the dashboard to use it.
Assist on Android Wear
We want to make it as easy as possible to use Assist. To enable this for Android users, we have added a new tile to the Android Wear app. A simple swipe from the clock face will show the assist button and allows you to send voice commands.
Assist on Android Wear documentation.
The brand new tile is at present out there within the Android beta and shall be a part of the following Android launch.
Assist via Siri and Apple Shortcuts
For Apple devices we have been able to create a fully hands-free experience by integrating with Siri. This is powered by a new Apple Shortcut action called Assist, which is part of the Home Assistant app. This shortcut action can also be manually triggered from your Mac taskbar, iPhone home screen or Apple Watch complication. We have two ready-made shortcuts that users can import from the documentation with a single tap to unlock these features.
Assist via Siri and Apple Shortcuts documentation.
The Help shortcut shall be out there within the Mac and iOS beta channel at present and shall be a part of the following launch for iOS and Mac.
Customized Sentences
With Dwelling Assistant we imagine that each house is uniquely yours and that technology should adapt to you, not the other way around. That’s why we have architected Home Assistant to allow users to extensively customize their experience. Our Assist feature is no different.
- Are you into Game of Thrones and want every response to be “hodor”?
- Want to turn on lights in rooms by saying “Hocus pocus living room”?
- Want to trigger your party mode script using a custom sentence?
Assist includes support for custom sentences, responses and intents, allowing you to achieve all of the above, and more. We’ve designed the custom sentence format in a way that it can be easily shared with the community.
Read the documentation on tips on how to get began.
In a future launch we’re planning on including a consumer interface to customise and import sentences.
Custom Assist engines
By default Assist is powered by our own intent recognizer. It is local but it’s limited to controlling devices. Maybe you want to be able to ask more wide-range queries or you are looking for a conversational AI that will make up responses and present it as the truth. For such cases the Assist feature supports swapping out its engine that handles all Help interactions.
The Dwelling Assistant 2023.2 launch consists of two various Help engines that you could allow: Google Assistant and OpenAI GPT-3.
The Google Assistant Help engine is ready to management your gadgets when you have linked up your Dwelling Assistant occasion to Google Assistant.
All methods to intereact with Help will work, as they don’t seem to be certain to the the Help engine that’s getting used. So for those who ever wished to make use of Google Assistant in your HomePod, now you’ll be able to 🤭
The OpenAI GPT-3 Help engine will course of all of your interactions utilizing GPT-3, a sibling of the notorious ChatGPT. It isn’t in a position to management your own home or allow you to automate your own home. Something you ask it could or will not be factually appropriate. However it may be enjoyable!
In a future launch we’re planning to make it attainable to configure a number of Help engines to deal with interactions.
What’s next
For Year of the Voice – Chapter 1 we focused on building intent recognition into Home Assistant while relying on Google and Apple to do the hard parts (speech recognition). This allowed us the fastest path to get something to the community to play with.
We will continue collecting home automation sentences for all languages (anyone can help!). Updates shall be included with each main launch of Dwelling Assistant.
Our subsequent step is integrating Speech-to-Textual content and Textual content-to-Speech with Help. We don’t have a timeline but when that shall be prepared. Keep tuned!
Credits
A lot of people have worked very hard to make all of the above possible.
Technology:
Mike Hansen, Paulus Schoutsen, Daniel Shokouhi, Zac West, Rosemary Orchard, Tronikos
Language Leaders:
@AalianKhan, @Ahmed-farag36, @alpdmrel, @arunshekher, @auanasgheps, @benjaminlecouteux, @bluefoxlee, @cibernox, @cvladan, @davefx, @dinhchinh82, @dsimop, @duhow, @easterapps, @ErnestStaug, @fadamsen, @flexy2dd, @gabimarchidan, @haim-b, @halecivo, @HepoH3, @hertzg, @hristo-atanasov, @huusissa, @joaorgoncalves, @larsdunemark, @leranp, @LubosKadasi, @makstech, @mojikosu, @MTrab, @nagyrobi, @schizza, @Scorpoon, @skynetua, @spuljko, @tetele, @TheFes, @Uriziel01, @xraver, @zubir2k
Voice Neighborhood:
@Alexivia, @Atalonica, @AwesomeGuy000, @BossNeo, @CedricFinance, @Davidsoff, @EmilZackrisson, @FragMenthor, @InfiniteBed, @Kalma-House, @Licmeth, @Marlo461, @N3rdix, @Nismonx, @Robin-St, @TaQuangTien, @ThomDietrich, @TomaszPilch, @Wojciechgc, @alessandroias, @bemble, @berendhaan, @dejan2101, @dependabot[@bot], @dobromir-hristov, @frenck, @hugovsky, @iddiek, @jfisbein, @jharrvis, @jorclaret, @kamildoleglo, @kblin, @khymmera, @kroimon, @lellky, @ludeeus, @lukahra, @lunmay, @mardito, @martindybal, @mib1185, @michaelmior, @orrc, @pckahrs, @piitaya, @pmentis, @poltalashka, @rPonuganti, @rechin304, @relust, @rickydg, @rpochot, @rrakso, @rumbu13, @sanyatuning, @tasmin, @thecode, @waltlillyman, @witold-gren, @x15pa3ck15x, @yuvalabou
