Almond m&ms

Almond m&ms up with Almond, available in Home Assistant 0. Introducing Ada, voice assistant powered by Home Assistant integrations. New beta speech-to-text and text-to-speech service for Home Assistant Cloud subscribers.

Voice assistants are a great way to interact with your house, ask a quick question, set a timer or control your devices. The more an assistant knows about you, your home and its other inhabitants, the better it is able to help you. Today’s available virtual assistants work great, but they have a big problem: They store your data in the cloud, don’t provide APIs to allow other companies to build products on top and are run by companies whose core business is building profiles on their users to help serve ads and product suggestions. The backbone to our homes needs to be one that keeps data local and has APIs allowing other companies to build on top. Innovation happens when many different people, with many different backgrounds, do many different experiments until we find something that sticks.

This cannot be left to a single company. Recently we got in touch with the Open Virtual Assistant Lab at Stanford University. In the last four years, they have been working on a virtual assistant named Almond. And it’s a perfect match for Home Assistant. Almond Almond is an open, privacy-preserving virtual assistant that is open source.

With Almond, you can run a virtual assistant at home, that can tell you the news or control your house. The Almond team has updated Almond to make it aware of the different device types in Home Assistant and allow Almond to control them. In turn, we have upgraded the conversation integration in Home Assistant to support Almond, allowing users to converse with Almond via the frontend. Screenshot showing Almond integration in Home Assistant.

Almond is available to users today in Home Assistant 0. Almond Web, a cloud version hosted by Stanford. Almond is set up in a way such that your privacy is still partially preserved even with LUInet running in the cloud. Alexa You’re probably wondering if Almond is as good as Alexa or Google. And it’s not yet as good. If you want to have an assistant in your home that knows everything about you, it needs to be one that cares about privacy.