this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
444 points (98.3% liked)
Privacy
32072 readers
385 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Go with Home Assistant and never use some proprietary hub again.
Is there a list of stuff it's compatible with? I have a pi I'm running some shit on now, automation may be fun if I can avoid proprietary garbo.
It's compatible with everything. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/
Oh damn it can be a voice assistant or whatever they're called too?
Yeah alright I'll be looking into that tomorrow lol
Yes for sure with Google or Alexa and I think HA is working on their own voice stuff, but haven't looked into it too deeply as I haven't really ever utilized voice commands apart from tinkering with them briefly. A spare Pi works great but you can also use other stuff like a cheap Dell Optiplex micro or and old laptop. If you use the Pi, I'd recommend installing a small SSD with it and running it off that versus an SD card. The card won't last long with all the read/writes.
They already have a sort of functional "Assistant". You can type to it, or you can use OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text language model loaded up on your Home Assistant machine through an add-on in order to talk to it, it works pretty much as well as any other proprietary speech to text model, except it's self hosted. The assistant can talk back with another add-on, though the voices are still too robotic IMO.
Key part in all of this is the "sort of functional" bit. Commands seem to have to be very literal to be understood, otherwise it just tells you it doesn't understand.
I'd still rather host my own assistant than rely on Google or Alexa, though, so I'm just gonna put my faith on the HASS team.
Oh yeah I already have an external drive on it, I run a handful of services on it now, but I need to start fresh again anyway because that's easier than troubleshooting why it's going derpy.
In true IT fashion, instead of troubleshooting I just scheduled a nightly reboot 😂
It works incredibly well with HomeKit too. I use Siri to control my HA managed devices all the time.
Not quite everything.
I can’t get my Meross garage door module into HA so I’m stuck using HomeKit exclusively. But I control most things through my phone so it hasn’t been a problem, just limits some automations I can do with it.
I have a Pi that's sitting doing nothing, so now I know what I'm doing next time it's raining 😂
Self hosting isn't hard to get into, really. You should look into it!