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.