Pocster

SWMBO away . If another ‘ box ‘ appeared in IT cupboard she would not notice 😉

Kitchen roll for big boys

I read recently that openAI said 99% use ChatGPT as a toy . Without spending a fortune on say Claude tokens chat gives the best of both worlds for me ; creativity and technical. It stuns me that after the internet and now LLM that people just don’t leverage the capabilities they have access to . Still as you say depends what layer you are at on the onion …

Thermostat is automation car lights come on when dark it’s everywhere - just don’t think of it . Time to take it up from HA doing a lot ( and working surprisingly well ) . Local LLM gold standard 💪

😂😂😂😂 . Limited vision expected from people whom clearly don’t understand the impact of local LLM and incorporating it into everything you can think of .

Gonna need more RAM , gonna need more GPU …

You know what . I did that . I bed 4 tiles today

Chatting to my best mate we’ve had a strategic change . Going to historical LLM use multiple 8 way microphone arrays . Be able then to localise regions based on timing of wake word to hit which mic . LLM allows a lot of fuzzy talk e.g “ play something I like by Coldplay “ Going to add a database so we have history I.e in the above example you would play Coldplay album that I have played the most in the last 3 months on the speaker nearest to the microphone. This exceeds Alexa capabilities. History of lighting / music etc from previous actions . Equally I could record conversations as reminders to be replayed later 😊 ; can’t see any issues with SWMBO there . Then we can take intent into assumptions . I get home at 7pm in a Friday rather than I ask for radio on Avalon ( that’s what it’s called ) could implement the likelyhood and therefore ask “ do you want the radio on Pocster ? “. As constant querying verbally may become annoying we can have a point where it simply puts the radio in based on probability of that is what I want . Also once wake word is received any audio has its volume reduced while doing speech to text as you speak I.e not waiting for command to finish . Add in the voice id ( Alexa does this but not very well ) I.e SWMBO talking or me . If SWMBO requests something I haven’t authorised then confirmation is requested from me . The more I think about this more uses I can think off - some OTT of course - but that’s the fun !

Piss the bed on my behalf! 👍

You’ve got it ! After building for 10 yrs a bit of variety and fun projects are required !

Rain everyday I think . Nothing has come through though since last post . Have mostly built my internal sky light internal gutter -ready to install .

Remember this is local and no LLM overkill . It was look at this today or painting …

Clearly you don’t understand the issue . You cannot get Alexa to do exactly what you want without jumping through hoops “ Alexa play a random album by Coldplay “ and it selects a random cold play from your squeeze box and streamers to a default streamer . Or “ Alex disable jamma cabinet “ - recognises my voice only and does that . You can frig some of these but it’s a pita also Amazon can cause issues . I can and will have dashboard when done that these things are selectable. Home assistant voice can do these things with some effort but as said it’s microphones are crap . “ ok nabu radio on “ ; asking it then to turn radio off it won’t be able to mask out the background radio !!! Once you have a stable reliable system there are many things that can be achieved - limitation is people’s imagination. Posting here will of course land on lots of “ why bother “ views . Take my home cinema setup . 1 button does about 6 things ( SWMBO friendly ) yet some of this hardware has no Bluetooth / zigbee / WiFi - so making dumb things work in the chain can be challenging. Some of you have no vision …. 😆

Easily ! Mac Time Machine - backups up automatically every day / week

I’m on a roll here ! Getting Alexa to run your own automations and use your own wording is a pita . Lots of “ let’s stop you “ from Amazon . So I had a ha voice assistant - it’s ok ; but its microphones are poor . So ! Let’s make something that’s as reliable as Alexa that’s local and no LLM . zillion discussions with chat - and we have a planned approach . Bought an office style conference speaker unit . So multi directional etc . Mac mini has good processing for noise/ background suppression before passing it on . Speech back will be via a squeezebox player . . VOICE SYSTEM – SOFTWARE STACK SUMMARY Wake Word Detection Software options: Porcupine (Picovoice) openWakeWord Snowboy (older / legacy) Purpose: Continuously listens for a wake phrase locally with very low CPU. Speech-to-Text (STT) Software: Whisper (OpenAI Whisper local model) whisper.cpp (faster C++ local version) Faster-Whisper OpenAI Whisper API (cloud option) Purpose: Converts recorded audio into text. Speaker Identification (Voice ID) Software options: Resemblyzer (voice embeddings) pyannote.audio SpeechBrain speaker recognition Picovoice Eagle (commercial) Purpose: Creates a voice fingerprint and compares it against enrolled users. Important: This runs separately from Whisper. Voice identity ≠ transcript content. Intent Parsing / Command Understanding If rule-based: Home Assistant built-in intent engine Rhasspy Permission & Policy Layer Software: Home Assistant user permissions Custom Python logic Node-RED (optional orchestration layer) Purpose: Checks: Who spoke? Are they authorised? Does this require confirmation? Implements: “Pocster is that OK?” → wait for verified response. Execution Layer Software: Home Assistant MQTT broker (Mosquitto) ESPHome Custom Python services Purpose: Triggers actual devices, UI events, or automations. Text-to-Speech (TTS) Software: Piper (local neural TTS) Coqui TTS ElevenLabs (cloud) Home Assistant TTS integrations Purpose: System speaks back to the user. Clean Stack Example (Fully Local Setup) Wake word: openWakeWord STT: whisper.cpp Voice ID: Resemblyzer Intent: Home Assistant or local LLM via Ollama Permissions: Custom Python layer Execution: Home Assistant + MQTT TTS: Piper That is the full named software stack for your speech recognition + speaker ID + command system.

It was this or some tiling ……

Wiring was already in per room . Zero hum anyway . So it’s more an upgrade I guess that a new system . You could of course stick Sonos everywhere at great cost. Selling those 5 pis and Hifiberry amps on eBay covered the cost of replacement system .

I have used max2play for audio in the past and you can set it to do no sd writes once booted . Sd card failure is pretty common on pi’s . Nvr , Emmc etc all doable but they’re not really ‘ premium grade ‘ . That NUC i3 I got 2nd hand off eBay for £40 . So with its ram and ssd not only cheaper than the pi equip, but more robust .

You can or tbh more usually seperate audio per zone . Squeezebox

Been doing this with 5 raspberry pi’s . But it’s a pita to mange with sd card failures etc So ! Another project ! nuc i3 + hdmi touch screen ( just because it’s spare ) , usb powered hub . Cheap dacs into cheap amp boards apart from ‘ proper audio ‘ via smsl . All in 1 case ; just 1 plug . Here’s the bits !

Oi (expletive deleted) buddies ! We do this because we can . Also other uses for said technology.

Tried and failed with m5stack audio hat . Complete shite . Headphone socket suggesting audio out as would expect . But routes completely different from internal speaker . Couldn’t get it working - tried every example and ChatGPT , best was crackly shite . Swore a lot than wired an amp off gpio . Works but forgot how microscopic everything is !

Not just a building trade trick 😉

(expletive deleted)ing ? pricking ? sucking ? mofo ing ?

Yeah that’s all wank . The entire point of automation is you don’t do anything .So lights / heating etc come on automatically. 1 button push ( SWMBO friendly ) causes ust projector to come on , shelf slides out , amp turns on , 120” ( I’m big ) screen goes up and the pants ( blinds ) come down . User interface if you must have one must be simple and intuitive - anything other is poor design . You should see what I’m working on ….. people need simplicity even if under the hood it’s a bitch . Anyone care to look under my hood 😉