Enlarge / The most impressive part is what Home Assistant's voice control does not do: share your voice input with a large entity aiming to sell you things. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Last year, the leaders of Home Assistant declared 2023 the “ Year of the Voice. ” The goal was to let users of the DIY home automation platform “control Home Assistant in their own language.” It was a bold shot to call, given people’s expectations from using Alexa and the like. Further, the Home Assistant team wasn’t even sure where to start.

Did they succeed, looking in from early 2024? In a very strict sense, yes. Right now, with some off-the-shelf gear and the patience to flash and fiddle, you can ask “Nabu” or “Jarvis” or any name you want to turn off some lights, set the thermostat, or run automations. And you can ask about the weather. Narrowly defined mission: Accomplished.

In a broader, more accurate sense, Home Assistant voice control has a ways to go. Your verb set is limited to toggling, setting, and other smart home interactions. The easiest devices to use for this don’t have the best noise cancellation or pick-up range. Errors aren’t handled gracefully, and you get the best results by fine-tuning the names you call everything you control.

Enlarge / The Homey Pro, settling in for some quiet network check-ins at dusk. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

I know there are people who will want to buy the Homey Pro . I’ve seen them on social media and in various home automation forums, and I’ve even noticed them in the comments on this website. For this type of person, the Homey Pro might serve as a specialized, locally focused smart home hub, one that's well worth the cost. But you should be really, truly certain that you’re that person before you take a $400 leap with it.

Homey Pro is a smart home hub pitched primarily at someone who wants to keep things local as much as possible, forgoing phone apps, speakers, and cloud connections. That means using the Homey Pro to boost a primarily Zigbee or Z-Wave network, while also looping in local Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even infrared remotes. It’s for someone willing to pay $400 for a device that offers robust local or cloud backups, professional design, advanced automation, and even a custom scripting language, along with access to some “experiments” and still-in-progress tech like Matter and Thread. It’s for someone who might want to add a select cloud service or two to their home, but not because they have no other option.

But this somebody has also, somehow, not already invested in Home Assistant , Hubitat , or HomeBridge , which are more open to both add-on hardware (like new capabilities added on by USB stick or GPIO pins) and deep tinkering. It's someone who is willing to check that every device they want to control will work with Homey. While the device offers a pretty sizable range of apps and integrations , it’s far from the near-universal nature of major open-source projects or even the big smart home platforms. And you have to do a little checking further, still, to ensure that individual products are supported, not just the brand.

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Before last week, owners of certain Mazda vehicles who also had a Home Assistant setup could set up some handy connections for their car.

One CX60 driver had a charger that would only power on when it confirmed his car was plugged in and would alert him if he left the trunk open. Another used Home Assistant to control their charger based on the dynamic prices of an Agile Octopus energy plan . Yet another had really thought it through, using Home Assistant to check the gas before their morning commute, alert them if their windows were down before rain was forecast, and remotely unlock and start the car in cold conditions. The possibilities were vast , and purportedly beyond what Mazda's official app offered.

Mazda, however, had issues with the project, which was largely the free-time work of one software developer, Brandon Rothweiler . In a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice sent to GitHub , Mazda (or an authorized agent) alleges that Rothweiler's integration:

Enlarge / Google's smart home ambitions are exactly the kind of thing Willow and Home Assistant are trying to help people avoid. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Getty Images)

Big Tech voice assistants are struggling. Alexa is Amazon's biggest money-loser , Apple's Siri is mired in organizational dysfunction and cautiousness , and Google is leaning hard into every kind of AI except its own Assistant . The open source, privacy-minded Home Assistant, with perfect timing, aims to step into the void with a local-only voice assistant .

There's one big problem: Home Assistant doesn't yet offer any hardware you can buy and put on your kitchen counter. That's the gap a curious new project, Willow , aims to fill. It's a project to utilize a specific set of hardware: ESP-32-BOX devices, which provide a basic hardware shell around ESP32 SoCs . Once flashed with Willow, they can work as locally controlled voice assistants and, eventually, great and easy access points for Home Assistant.

They're not going to win design awards, but they look a lot nicer on a kitchen counter or desktop than a bare Raspberry Pi with a microphone HAT on , or repurposed gaming or teleconference hardware.

Enlarge / SwitchBot's new Hub 2 is most helpful for those who already have SwitchBot products in their home, but also those with infrared devices they'd like to automate. (credit: SwitchBot)

The Matter smart home connectivity standard has huge promise and lots of device makers lined up to engage with a theoretically more open, less server-dependent future. And yet, so far, I haven't been compelled to write about any individual products launching with Matter support. Most of them are simply familiar products—light bulbs, turning door locks, wall switches—that now can be set up in a different, cross-platform way ( however painfully ). Most wouldn't compel anyone who already has a functioning version of them to upgrade or expand their setup.

Here's the first thing to make me take notice, and it is, of all things, a hub. The SwitchBot Hub 2 (also $70 on Amazon ) makes the most sense if you already have some SwitchBot products in your home and might want to take them beyond their default Bluetooth range with Wi-Fi connectivity. But I think it might also appeal to someone looking for an entryway to a small, controlled, and useful smart home.

For one thing, the Hub 2 isn't just a puck of plastic that does nothing but coordinate traffic for a subset of devices. I have two of those taking up space in my home, from Phillips Hue and Samsung SmartThings. They hang out within Ethernet distance of my router, eating trickle power and generating a little heat pocket on that shelf. They are quiet, mostly useless roommates who will be evicted by some future upgrade.

Enlarge / We don't have to rely on megacorp obelisks to operate the things we buy. We don't have to learn their language. We can break free. (credit: PonyWang/Getty Images)

For many people, an automated smart home is about little things that add up to big conveniences over time. Lights turning on when you pull into the driveway, a downstairs thermostat adjustable from your upstairs bedroom, a robot vacuum working while you're at the grocery store—you put in a bit of setup work and your life gets easier.

What most smart homes also include, however, is a voice assistant, the opposite of a quiet, unseen convenience. Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant: They demand that you learn specific device names and structures for commands, while they frequently get even the most simple command astoundingly wrong. And they are, of course, an always-listening corporate microphone you're allowing inside your home.

There are ways to keep that smart home convenience while cutting out the conversation. Some involve your phone, some dedicated devices, but none of them involve saying a device's name. Here's an overview of the best options available.

Enlarge / Home Assistant running on a Google Nest Hub, via a wild Chromecast hack. Native hardware like this would be nice. (credit: Home Assistant )

Are cloud-based voice assistants doomed? That seems like an overly dramatic question to ask if you look at the current state of millions of users of Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple's Siri, but we're not so sure about the future. Google and Amazon have backed away from their voice assistants recently, with Amazon firing a big chunk of the Alexa team due to it losing $10 billion a year . Google isn't quite at the "fire everyone" stage, but it is reportedly less interested in supporting the Assistant on third-party devices, which would be a crippling move given Google's extremely small hardware division. Everyone built these systems assuming a revenue stream would come later, but that revenue never came, and it's starting to seem like the bubble is bursting.

One project that has a heavy dependence on Big Tech voice assistants isn't sitting around and waiting for doomsday. The team at Home Assistant is declaring 2023 "Home Assistant's year of Voice." This is basically the leading smart home project saying, "If these cloud voice assistants don't provide Big Tech with a multi-billion dollar revenue stream, that's fine, we'll do it ourselves!" There are a few nascent, open source voice assistant projects out there already, but the Home Assistant team has proven it can manage a big project. It has a huge, thriving community and enough revenue to have full-time employees, making this the new frontrunner for a viable local voice service.

Plus Home Assistant isn't starting from scratch—it went and found what it called the "most promising" open source voice assistant out there, "Rhasspy," and hired the lead developer, Mike Hansen, to work full-time on voice in Home Assistant. Hasen will now work at Nabu Casa, the Home Assistant's commercialization company. According to Home Assistant's founder, Paulus Schoutsen, "Rhasspy stands out from other open source voice projects because Mike doesn’t focus on just English. Instead, his goal is to make it work for everyone. This is going great as Rhasspy supports already 16 different languages today." The plan is to support all 62 languages the Home Assistant currently supports, but with voice, all without needing an Internet connection.

Enlarge / The SmartDry laundry sensor was widely regarded as a useful smart home gadget that saved money and time. When its owners' servers go dark at the end of September, users face a useless device or a notable DIY journey. (credit: Getty Images)

SmartDry was a smart home product that did something useful: tell you when your clothes in your dryer were actually dry.

A small pack mounted inside nearly any dryer drum could prevent clothes from shrinking, save you energy costs (at least $60 per year, the marketing claimed), and even warn you about clogged vents causing high heat—or, much worse, gas buildup. A second-generation version could even turn off your gas dryer automatically. Reviewers greatly preferred it to their own dryers' unpredictable dryness sensors.

The problem is that SmartDry alerted you to dry clothing by connecting to your home's Wi-Fi; the device sent a message to parent company Connected Life's servers and then relayed that message to your smartphone. But Connected Life Labs is closing, discontinuing SmartDry, and shutting down its servers on September 30. After that, "cloud services will cease operations and the product apps will no longer be supported."