I've been waiting for someone to build a proper voice assistant that doesn't phone home to Amazon, Google, or anyone else. The Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition is exactly what I was looking for—and at $59, it's surprisingly affordable.
This little device is purpose-built for Home Assistant fans who want voice control without the cloud. It's not trying to compete with Alexa or Google Assistant on features. It's trying to replace them with something that stays in your house and respects your privacy.
What's Inside
The hardware is straightforward. You're getting an ESP32-S3 processor paired with an XMOS audio chip, a dual microphone array, and 3.5mm audio out. It's about the size of a hockey puck. The real magic is in the software—it runs open-source firmware and offloads speech-to-text (via OpenAI's Whisper) and text-to-speech (via Piper) to your Home Assistant server.
This means your voice data never leaves your network. That's the whole point. The device listens locally, sends audio to your HA server over your network, processes it, and responds. If your internet goes down, you lose speech-to-text and some remote features, but the device itself still works.
Setting Up
If you're already running Home Assistant, the setup is straightforward. The device works on Wi-Fi, so just add it to your network and pair it through the Home Assistant onboarding flow. From there, you configure which entities (lights, switches, scenes, covers) respond to voice commands.
The wake word is "OK Nabu" out of the box. I wanted to change it, but you're limited to a handful of pre-trained options right now. That's a limitation, but the developers are actively improving this.
The Voice Experience
Here's where I need to be honest: the voice recognition isn't as polished as Alexa or Google yet. It works about 80 percent of the time on clear commands. Noisy rooms and accented speech give it more trouble. But the preview program is actually improving this regularly—I've seen measurable improvements over a few months.
Saying "turn on the living room lights" works great. "Set kitchen lights to 50 percent" works too. More complex commands like scene activation or multiple-step automations via voice are still a bit awkward. You're not going to use this for setting timers or playing music from Spotify. That's not what it's for.
Why This Matters
The real appeal is the complete absence of cloud dependency. Your privacy isn't being sold. Your voice interactions aren't being logged somewhere to train someone else's model. You own your data.
For Home Assistant power users—the folks already running their own hub and building automations—this is a no-brainer. It's the final piece of the privacy puzzle. You control your network, you control your data, you control your home.
If you're looking for an all-in-one voice assistant to replace everything Alexa does, this isn't it. But if you're looking for privacy-respecting voice control for your Home Assistant setup, there's nothing better.
Final Thoughts
The Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition fills a gap that's been frustrating for years. It's not perfect yet, but it's genuinely useful and it's only going to get better. At $59, it's a solid investment if you're already in the Home Assistant ecosystem.
Grab the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition and take control back.
