Home Assistant Voice

I’m not interested in the argument, but those numbers are way under reported. The analytics are opt-in, thus only those people that specifically enable it will report usage. This is really apparent when you look at the installations map at the bottom and it shows only ~89k installations in the US. Home assistant has FAR more installations than 500k. It was recently reported by HA themselves that there are approximately 2 million households using Home Assistant, but that number could also be skewed.

The text at the bottom of the screen says that ~400k of ~500k installations have chosen to share their used integrations.  So you’re saying that those 500k installations are just reported installations, not all installations?  If so, HA really should update that language as it is misleading.

The link clearly states on installations tab:

Analytics in Home Assistant are opt-in and do not reflect the entire Home Assistant userbase. We estimate that less than a fourth of all Home Assistant users opt in.

Ok.  But I would still say that you shouldn’t have to look at one tab to get full understanding of the data on another tab.

That maybe so, but you were told the 2M figure in response to your first post in the thread also.

I have read the whole thread.

My Sonos Era 100 arrived today. I bought it specifically for Home Assistant. I was really hoping the speaker would allow me to use its microphone to send commands to Home Assistant or my local LLM.

Just a thought about the whole discussion around user base. To make an analogy, it’s similar to someone trying to get hired, but everyone needs someone with experience and they can’t build experience because nobody hires them.

Yes, less than 1% of users use “Other” Voice Assistants - but that’s an effect which becomes a cause.

Shortly put, “If you build it, they will come”.

With that being said, I will not return the Sonos Era 100, but will not buy any more Sonos products because they don’t allow me to use this specific functionality, that is, being able to control my home using their device microphones. The potential for a customer is there: My house has 8 total rooms and 4 more various rooms outside the house, for a total of 12 possible devices I would have bought from Sonos. Whether I will buy more Sonos devices or not is up to Sonos.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not writing this with any negative connotation, it’s just a cold statement, an emotionless feedback, if you will.

“My Sonos Era 100 arrived today. I bought it specifically for Home Assistant.” You didn’t check?

I checked several things, such as whether the integration with Home Assistant works, whether it can be used as a media player, whether it can speak notifications. 

I assumed since all these other features are enabled, the microphone should also work. 

Again, I am not unhappy with the speaker, in general. I can live without the microphone feature on this device specifically, because I can place this particular speaker in an area where I am very unlikely to use voice integrations.

But it’s the difference between buying one device and buying many, a difference which means lost revenue for Sonos.

At the same time, I am aware I am but a drop in an ocean, so there’s that :)

Companies usually determine that there is significant demand for a product or service before they start trying to sell it.  It’s only the rare exceptions where a company will just build a product and and then attempt to create a demand.  This would typically be a company that has a lot of capital that can flood the market with cheap products only to raise the price (maybe)  after customers haven’t gotten accustomed to the product and don’t really want to do without it anymore.    Amazon’s release of  echo’s and their alexa service comes to mind.  I don’t think Sonos has the capital  to really pull off something similar with a Home assistant integration, nor could it possibly be anywhere near as big of a payoff.

instead, Sonos is going to do take more of the easy wins.  Look at the Phillips Hue integration.  I would bet that Sonos already knows that there are a lot of crossover between Hue and Sonos.  It also looks like the development of the integration was fairly straightforward and easy to implement and support. It probably doesn’t have anywhere near as big of the potential payoff as a Home Assistant integration theoretically could be, but they risk nothing in doing so.

I think it’s also worth noting that AI voice seems to be where the market is heading.  There are a lot of posts in the community asking about Gemini integration, and I suspect we will see more about Alexa AI eventually.  I don’t know that it makes sense for Sonos to put a lot of effort into non-AI voice features when it looks like the market is moving away from that. I could argue that smart home control doesn’t really need AI voice, but I don’t know that the market would agree with that.

I wouldn’t make any assumptions about features, especially when it’s critical to your purchasing decision.  Home Assistant can be controlled by Alexa, GA, and their own voice assistant ‘Assist’.  I don’t see any other voice assistant mentioned.

Totally agree  Sonos hardware is miles ahead of most smart speakers. Opening APIs for Home Assistant voice would rebuild trust and make Sonos the go-to choice for privacy-first setups.

The Sonos API is already open.  Any company wishing to integrate with Sonos can do so today:

https://developer.sonos.com/s/?language=en_US

Does the API also enable access to the microphone?

No. But that isn't what was specifically asked.  “Home Assistant Voice” is HA’s own  voice assistant, and thus it’s an interface for HA.  HA is using the API to control Sonos.

That said, it does seem that the topic is prone to miscommunication as to what exaclty people are asking for with this feature request.

There is a misunderstanding here.

The only thing that is required is to open up the smart speaker microphone as an entity in Home Assistant. No other voice features, AI, Assist or anything else is required. Just have the microphone visible and usable as an entity in Home Assistant, that’s all.

I can control my Home Assistant through my Android phone microphone, using only local resources (Piper, Whisperr, openwakeword, Ollama), using Home Assistant’s Assist. I would like to use the Sonos microphone to do the same. Just take my voice and push it to Home Assistant through that microphone, that’s all.

Well, the Sonos would need to then send the data to the Home Assistant servers, and then parse any relevant data that comes back, too. It isn’t as easy as ‘just opening the mic’

I never said that an integration that enables SVC to control HA would require AI.  I stated that Sonos maybe should focus on AI over integrations like this.

edit: I should have stated “an integration that allows HA Assist to use the Sonos speakers mics.  No SVC involved.

It doesn’t need to parse any data that comes back.

It needs to send the voice to a STT service, of course, for example using Wyoming Protocol, but that is literally all. Home Assistant can handle everything else.

I've been considering ways of moving away from Alexa / Google and one of the things that holds me back is a lack of support for features that I've come to rely on - namely home control by voice.

Where there is a Sonos speaker with a mic, I don't want to have to wire her another device with a microphone to be able to maintain current functionaliry.

I stumbled across this thread only to be frankly amazed at how many people are putting forward arguments for Sonos NOT supporting tighter integration with Home Assistant…

I mean… Why?! 

Sonos have their big person pants on, can do their own research and can also consider that certain services without huge market presence ‘coukd’ have potential, especially with their help, and especially as a company that has been through some trust issues on their own part …

The statistics quoted re use of e.g. Alexa and Google are pointless. They are that high because they are easily accessible. People don't really choose voice services in the conventional sense.

Were SONOS to contact and work on integration with Home Assistant, to be able to use a Sonos speaker to communicate with and control a home assistant setup that would be offering folk and alternative option. It seems like an exciting prospect.

I fully appreciate my own use case is incredibly niche - I have a voice disability, my partner doesn't. They still use their voice, I have worked out ways of interacting with my systems that don't require my voice now  - buttons, scripts and automations. Home Assistant has been brilliant for that and works already. But if Sonos could actually as a way to provide voice inputs for Home Assistant that would be even better, far more readily allow for more stable scripts and automations whilst preserving my partner’s ability to do all that with their voice still. It would mean not having to rely on so many third parties.

Alexa and Google don't really give a damn about accessibility. Home Assistant allows for far more flexibility beyond what any individual in a high castle would consider might ever be ‘useful’ to someone.

It just seems weird frankly that anyone would discourage that. 

After 7 months, lots of reply. Still no answer from Sonos, neither on supporting an open standard that could be a good move on the eyes of the customers, also on the future of google home assistant, which is getting worse and worse waiting for the LLM version.

How many developers do you have Sonos? This looks like a feature that you can implement in a few iterations.

Inside a Sonos One you typically have:

CPU

• Cortex-A7 / ARMv7 (Gen 1)

• Upgraded ARM SoC (Gen 2, faster CPU & more RAM)

Memory

• 256–512 MB RAM depending on model

• 4–8 GB flash

DSP

• Dedicated DSP for:

  • echo cancellation

  • noise suppression

  • far-field mic processing

  • beamforming

This is more than enough to run:

• wake-word models

• streaming ASR pipelines

• local inference at the scale of Wyoming Home Assistant voice modules

• or even a small offline speech model

A Raspberry Pi Zero can handle this.
A Sonos One is far more powerful, especially with its DSP chain.

Ended up here while doing some research for my next home audio upgrade, Sonos ticks almost all the boxes, except for this particular requirement.

As for all the comments about lack of market, that's kind of irrelevant. Development effort is relatively minor, and in an atmosphere where Sonos is desperate to regain trust with their customer base, implementing such a privacy-centric feature would generate a TON of positive buzz. They'd have their ROI in marketing alone.

It’s certainly possible your perception of the work involved, as well as the benefit, doesn’t match that of those Program Managers at Sonos. Doesn’t invalidate your input, though. 

For one thing, development is only part of the cost. You also have to consider the cost of testing, support, future development/testing to match home assistant upgrades, integrations with other features, impact on future feature implementation, etc.

If your marketing results in little or no sales due to the small size of the market, how are you actually getting a positive ROI?  In addition, how exactly is implementing a relatively small market voice activation feature going to help overcome a disastrous app update?  Do we really think one feature that appeals to a limited audiience amerliosrates the other far more widespread issue?

Playing devil’s advocate, it was stated up above that they believed that this integration/feature would create a market more than just take advantage of an existing market.  Meaning that people that do not currently have Home Assistant or Sonos  (or have HA but not Sonos) would see this integration and decided that now is the right time to purchase Sonos. 

You could argue that Sonos was created on similar principle.  People were building up their libraries of mp3s, without any really good way to play and control the music without sitting in front of the computer.  There was every reason to believe that the number of consumers with mp3 libraries to grow was only going to go up. At that time, there were no smartphones, no streaming music services, and a good arguement could be made that the existing of mp3 libraries was a big part of why these came into existence as well.

I don’t know that this is a similar situation, especailly since AI processing seems to be more popular than local processing.  Even then the fact that Sonos integrated with Philips Hue shows that they do somewhat believe local processing smart home control has a feature.  That market was something they were interested in.

Create a market/existing market.  Tomayto/Tomahto.  I personally don’t see Sonos driving a market for a particular voice assistant.  But hey, you may be correct.  But that is speculation, something I addressed earlier.