Home Assistant Voice

Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition

Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition is a small speaker for controlling a Home Assistant smart home by voice, made by Nabu Casa, the California company behind official Home Assistant hardware. Dual microphones and an XMOS audio chip pick up commands, processed locally or on Home Assistant Cloud. It launched in December 2024 and lists at $69 or €59.

Key Features

• Audio processing: A dual-mic array and XMOS XU316 chip handle echo cancellation, stationary noise removal and auto gain control.
• Local or cloud speech: Choose focused local processing (Speech-to-Phrase), full local processing such as Whisper, or Home Assistant Cloud.
• Wake words: On-device microWakeWord listens for 'Okay Nabu', 'Hey Jarvis' or 'Hey Mycroft'.
• Physical controls: A mute switch cuts power to the microphones, plus a button, rotary volume dial and multicolor LED ring.
• Open hardware: ESP32-S3 with ESPHome preloaded, open-source firmware, a Grove port and a 3.5 mm stereo output with a dedicated DAC.

Use Cases

• Smart home control: Turn on lights, set timers and add items to a shopping list by voice.
• Private voice assistant: Run speech processing on local hardware instead of a big tech cloud.
• LLM experiments: Connect a cloud or local LLM as the conversation agent or as a fallback for unknown commands.

Getting Started

The Voice Preview Edition is sold through Home Assistant retail partners listed on the product page: https://www.home-assistant.io/