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126 lines
7.4 KiB
Markdown
126 lines
7.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Getting started - Local"
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related:
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- docs: /voice_control/best_practices/
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title: Best practices with Assist
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- docs: /voice_control/expanding_assist/
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title: Expanding Assist
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- docs: /voice_control/voice_remote_local_assistant/
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title: Creating a local assistant
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- docs: /voice_control/voice_remote_expose_devices/
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title: Exposing devices to Assist
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- url: https://support.nabucasa.com/hc/en-us/categories/24451727188125-Home-Assistant-Voice-Preview-Edition
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title: Voice Preview Edition - Documentation
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---
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The simplest and most effective way to use Assist is to leverage the voice providers (for speech-to-text and text-to-speech) included in [Home Assistant Cloud](/voice_control/voice_remote_cloud_assistant/)
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If you are interested in setting up a fully local voice assistant, follow this setup:
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## Prerequisites
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For Assist to be able to talk to your Home Assistant setup your setup needs to be able to listen, understand and then talk back.
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In Home Assistant, the Assist pipelines are made up of various components that together form a voice assistant. For each component, you can choose from different options.
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- For listening and talking back, it needs your phone with the Home Assistant app, or a voice activated device.
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- For understanding, it needs to have a text-to-speech and speech-to-text software integrated.
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- For running all together, it needs to have the Home Assistant Operating System running.
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## Some options for speech-to-text and text-to-speech
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There are speech-to-text and text-to-speech options that run entirely local. No data is sent to external servers for processing.
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### Speech-to-text engines
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There are currently two options to run speech-to-text locally: **Speech-to-Phrase** and **Whisper**.
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#### Speech-to-Phrase
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[Speech-to-Phrase](https://github.com/OHF-voice/speech-to-phrase) is a close-ended speech model.
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- It transcribes what it knows.
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- Extremely fast transcription even on a Home Assistant Green or Raspberry Pi 4 (under one second).
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- Only supports a subset of Assist’s voice commands.
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- More open-ended items such as shopping lists, naming a timer, and broadcasts are *not* usable out of the box.
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- Speech-to-Phrase supports [various languages](https://github.com/OHF-voice/speech-to-phrase?tab=readme-ov-file#supported-languages).
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- These qualities make it a great option for Home control!
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#### Whisper
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[Whisper](https://github.com/openai/whisper) is an open-ended speech model.
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- It will try to transcribe everything.
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- The cost is slower processing speed:
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- On a Raspberry Pi 4, it takes around 8 seconds to process incoming voice commands.
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- On an Intel NUC, it is done in under a second.
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- Supports [various languages](https://github.com/openai/whisper#available-models-and-languages).
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- Whisper is only a great option in the following case:
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1. You have powerful hardware at home.
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2. You plan to extend your voice set-up beyond simple home control. For example, by pairing your assistant with an LLM-based agent.
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### Text-to-speech engine
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For text-to-speech, we have developed [Piper](https://github.com/rhasspy/piper). Piper is a fast, local neural text-to-speech system that sounds great and is optimized for the Raspberry Pi 4. It supports [many languages](https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/). On a Raspberry Pi, using medium quality models, it can generate 1.6s of voice in a second.
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Please be sure to check how either option will work in your language, since quality can change quite a bit.
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## Installing a local Assist pipeline
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For the quickest way to get your local Assist pipeline started, follow these steps:
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1. Install the add-ons to convert text into speech and vice versa.
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- Install the speech-to-text add-on of your choice, either {% my supervisor_addon addon="core_speech-to-phrase" title="**Speech-to-Phrase**" %} or {% my supervisor_addon addon="core_whisper" title="**Whisper**" %}.
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- Install {% my supervisor_addon addon="core_piper" title="**Piper**" %} for text-to-speech.
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- Start the add-ons.
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- Once the add-ons are started, head over to the integrations under {% my integrations title="**Settings** > **Devices & Services**" %}.
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- You should now see both services being discovered by the [Wyoming integration](/integrations/wyoming/).
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- For each integration, select **Add**.
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- You now have integrated a local speech-to-text engine of your choice (either {% my supervisor_addon addon="core_speech-to-phrase" title="**Speech-to-Phrase**" %} or {% my supervisor_addon addon="core_whisper" title="**Whisper**" %}) and a text-to-speech engine ({% my supervisor_addon addon="core_piper" title="**Piper**" %}).
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2. Setup your assistant.
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- Go to {% my voice_assistants title="**Settings** > **Voice assistants**" %} and select **Add assistant**.
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- **Troubleshooting**: If you do not see any assistants here, you are not using the default configuration. In this case, you need to add the following to your {% term "configuration.yaml" %} file:
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```yaml
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# Example configuration.yaml entry
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assist_pipeline:
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```
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- Enter a name. You can pick any name that is meaningful to you.
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- Select the language that you want to speak.
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- Under **Conversation agent**, select **Home Assistant**.
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- Under **Speech-to-text**, select the speech-to-text engine you choose in the previous step (either **Whisper** or **Speech-to-Phrase**). Select the language.
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- Under **Text-to-speech**, select **Piper**. Select the language.
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- Depending on your language, you may be able to select different language variants.
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3. That's it. You ensured your voice commands can be processed locally on your device.
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4. If you haven't done so yet, [expose your devices to Assist](/voice_control/voice_remote_expose_devices/#exposing-your-devices).
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- Otherwise you won't be able to control them by voice.
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## Fine-tuning Whisper and Piper for your setup
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You would like to tweak the configuration for better performance or accuracy?
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View some of the options in the video below. Explained by Mike Hansen, creator of Rhasspy, Piper, and Wyoming.
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<lite-youtube videoid="Tk-pnm7FY7c" videoStartAt="1589" videotitle="Configure your local Assist pipeline for your setup"></lite-youtube>
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The options are also documented in the add-on itself. Go to the {% my supervisor_addon addon="core_whisper" title="**Whisper**" %} or the {% my supervisor_addon addon="core_piper" title="**Piper**" %} add-on and open the **Documentation** page.
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Also be sure to check the specific tutorial for [using Piper in Automations](/voice_control/using_tts_in_automation/)
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## Learning more about Speech-to-Phrase
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You can check out [Voice Chapter 9](/blog/2025/02/13/voice-chapter-9-speech-to-phrase/) to learn more about why we introduced Speech-to-Phrase, and why it's a great option for home control.
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<lite-youtube videoid="k6VvzDSI8RU" videotitle="Voice Chapter 9"></lite-youtube>
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## Next steps
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Once Assist is configured, now can now start using it. You can now talk through your device ([Android](/voice_control/android/), [iOS](/voice_control/apple/) or [Voice Preview edition](https://support.nabucasa.com/hc/en-us/categories/24451727188125-Home-Assistant-Voice-Preview-Edition)).
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To get the best out of the voice interaction, don't forget to check the [best practices](/voice_control/best_practices/).
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