Any experiences with a self-hosted assistant like the modern Google Assistant? Looking for something LLM-powered that is smarter than older assistants that would just try to call 3rd party tools directly and miss or misunderstand requests half of the time.
I’d like integration with a mobile app to use it from the phone and while driving. I see Home Assistant has an Android Auto integration. Has anyone used this, or another similar option? Any blatant limitations?
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Home Assistant can absolutely do that. If you are ok with simple intent based phrasing it’ll do it out of the box. If you want complex understanding and reasoning you’ll have to run a local LLM, like Llama, on top of it
yeah, that’s what I’m looking for. Do you know of a way to integrate ollama with HA?
I don’t think there’s a straightforward way like a HACS integration yet, but you can access Ollama from the web with open-webui and save the page to your homepage:
Just be warned, you’ll need a lot of resources depending on which model you choose and its parameter count (4B, 7B etc) – Gemma3 4B uses around 3GB storage, 0.5GB RAM and 4GB of VRAM to respond. It’s a compromise as I can’t get replacement RAM, and tends to be wildly inaccurate with large responses. The one I’d rather use, Dolphin-Mixtral 22B, takes 80GB storage and 17GB min RAM, the latter of which I can’t afford to take from my other services.
There’s an Ollama integration that adds it as a conversation agent.
ah, this puts it together and it’s exactly what I was looking for, thanks
And there’s another custom component, integrating all servers with an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint: https://github.com/jekalmin/extended_openai_conversation
I don’t like the guy’s breathless over-enthusiasm, but NetworkChuck has a video on how to integrate LLM-based voice assistants with HomeAssistant using Whisper and Ollama.
Multi-billion dollar companies like Google and Apple can’t even figure this shit out, doubt some nerd is gonna do it for free.
- They can and do; 2. LLMs can do tool calling just fine, even self-hosted ones.
LOL they can’t even reliably turn the lights on, WTF are you talking about?
maybe last you tried it was over 6 months ago, maybe you’re using the old google assistant, or idk, but it definitely works for me
Everything I’ve read says Gemini is like 10x worse than Google Assistant.
It’s gotten better. Which is to say, it’s almost feature compatible with the old assistant. But you can also give it context. So for example, if you say “remind me X”, you can get it to automatically remind you tomorrow with an alert at 9am, unless you specify a different time. And it’s ok if you screw up the phrasing a bit.
But DIY is infinitely better. If you have the resources.
