Home Assistant today announced the availability of Voice Preview Edition, a proprietary design of a home-friendly box that provides voice support for home automation. After using it for a few weeks, it seems like a good place to start, at least for those getting comfortable with the settings. That’s why Home Assistant calls it a “Preview Edition.”

The Voice Preview Edition (PU) (60/60 euros, available now) uses the data protection-oriented Nabu Casa cloud for processing – or your own powerful computer – and has approximately the footprint of a modern Apple TV, but is thinner. It works similarly to an Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri device, but with a more targeted aim. Start with a wake word – the default and most trained version is “Okay, Nabu,” but “Hey, Jarvis” and “Hey, Mycroft” are available. Next, enter a command, usually something that targets a smart home device: “Turn on living room lights,” “Set thermostat to 68,” “Enable TV time.” And then this usually happens.

“This thing” is primarily the control of devices, scenes and automation around your home that are set up in the Home Assistant. This means you must have assigned them a name or alias that you can remember. Coming up with naming schemes is something you end up doing in high-tech smart home systems too, but in VPE it’s a little more important.

At least if you have a Google Home, Alexa, or Apple Home ecosystem, you don’t have to start from scratch with all your gear. Home Assistant has good built-in “bridge” options for connecting all the devices you have set up and named in these ecosystems.

It’s important to set up a neatly organized smart home with a VPE box, otherwise it won’t do much good or bad. Unless you plug it into an AI model.

The voice device that is intentionally not very talkative

The VPE box can run timers (with handy LED ring progress indicators), and with a little tweaking of the settings, you can connect it to Home Assistant’s built-in shopping lists and to-do lists, or most other plug-ins or extensions to your Home Assistant system . If you’re willing to mess around with LLMs like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini on-premises or via cloud subscriptions, you can trigger prompts with your voice, but performance varies.