Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition
Shares rank 9 of 19 smart speakers by recommenders
Recommended as an open-source local voice assistant with a near Alexa or Google Home feel. Critics agree its microphone and speaker fall short of Echo and Google Home devices.
Recommended as an open-source local voice assistant with a near Alexa or Google Home feel. Critics agree its microphone and speaker fall short of Echo and Google Home devices.
22 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 14
- criticize it
- 8
- approval share
- 64%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 14 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Works well, nice little devices
“I've have great success with Home Assistant and the Home Assistant Voice Preview edition”
Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “A 30B Qwen Model Walks into a Raspberry Pi and Runs in Real Time” “buy their off the shelf voice hardware, which works really well”
Comment from 24 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?” “They're very nice little devices.”
Comment from 24 Mar 2026 in “Box of Secrets: Discreetly modding an apartment intercom to work with Apple Home” Alexa-like experience with easy setup
“was able to get an Alexa/Google Home-like experience going with minimal effort”
Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “Raspberry Pi's New AI Hat Adds 8GB of RAM for Local LLMs” “potentially easy to setup yet relatively open”
Comment from 10 Apr 2026 in “An AI Robot in My Home” Open-source and runs locally
“You might be interested in the open-source https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Real-time AI (audio/video in, voice out) on an M3 Pro with Gemma E2B” “All local and fairly energy-reasonable”
Comment from 16 Jul 2026 in “Guerrilla London Bus Ads Mock Kylie Jenner's Meta Glasses Campaign”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Weak microphone and wake word pickup
“HA Voice (the current hardware) does not do well enough in the mic or speaker department when compared to the Echos.”
Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “A 30B Qwen Model Walks into a Raspberry Pi and Runs in Real Time” “where it did perform a lot worse with the multiple bits of white noise and odd room shape”
Comment from 8 Jan 2026 in “A 30B Qwen Model Walks into a Raspberry Pi and Runs in Real Time” “Somehow nothing is even 50% good as my Echo devices at picking up the wake word”
Comment from 16 Mar 2026 in “My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant” - Comment from 16 Mar 2026 in “My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant”
- Comment from 1 Jul 2026 in “Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers”
Speaker weaker than Echo or Google
“HA Voice (the current hardware) does not do well enough in the mic or speaker department when compared to the Echos.”
Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “A 30B Qwen Model Walks into a Raspberry Pi and Runs in Real Time” “It's surprisingly good, but still falls short when compared to Google Home speakers”
Comment from 16 Mar 2026 in “My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant” “the audio performance is miserable on the preview device”
Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “A 30B Qwen Model Walks into a Raspberry Pi and Runs in Real Time” - Comment from 1 Jul 2026 in “Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers”
Other smart speakers people recommend
The four most recommended other smart speakers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Siri | 165 | 715 | 19% | 12 | 7 yrs23 owners | — |
| Amazon Alexa | 45 | 131 | 26% | 11 | — | — |
| Bose SoundTouch smart speakers | 37 | 18 | 67% | 1 | — | — |
| Google Assistant | 33 | 64 | 34% | 10 | — | — |
| Home Assistant Voice Preview EditionThis page | 14 | 8 | 64% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
23 of the 24 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Nobody wants to say 'Hey Nabu' though ;) Including me (and I bought one of the things)”
“Looks like it supports custom wake words too.”
“Now I can yell from the couch to create me a new Proxmox container”
“Under a hundred bucks?! Ooooh!”
“All local and fairly energy-reasonable”
“cant see how the voice preview is even usable”
“Bad speaker, bad mic, bad pickup.”
“Performance is so far worse, so I'll be doing some tuning on that.”
“potentially easy to setup yet relatively open”
“You might be interested in the open-source https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/”
“They're very nice little devices.”
“it ended up costing a lot for what it is”
“It's surprisingly good, but still falls short when compared to Google Home speakers”
“it only registers the rest of my family (women and children) ~30% of the time”
“Somehow nothing is even 50% good as my Echo devices at picking up the wake word”
“I looked at their Wyoming docs online but couldn't really see how to even let it find the server”
“buy their off the shelf voice hardware, which works really well”
“was able to get an Alexa/Google Home-like experience going with minimal effort”
“where it did perform a lot worse with the multiple bits of white noise and odd room shape”
“I've not had any issues with the audio picking up, but its in the living room rather than the kitchen.”
“the audio performance is miserable on the preview device”
“HA Voice (the current hardware) does not do well enough in the mic or speaker department when compared to the Echos.”
“I've have great success with Home Assistant and the Home Assistant Voice Preview edition”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.