Man, I hope someone designs a dock for this with a better speaker for music!!!
Because of googles enshitification I have stopped using voice to control my home entirely. I invested in many scene remotes and built extensive automations. I’ve come to not miss voice control at all. But here’s to you that want this either for assistive needs or just because. I just need to get a few more local TTS speakers for alerts.
I’ve had my eye on this for a while, haven’t dropped the dough on a PCB order
https://github.com/justLV/onju-voice
A hackable AI home assistant platform using the Google Nest Mini (2nd gen) form factor, consisting of:
a custom PCB designed to be a drop-in replacement to the original, using the ESP32-S3 for audio processing
a server for handling the transcription, response generation and Text-to-Speech from multiple devices on the same network
I ordered some I have 4 other PCBs
My main problem with this is that the speaker isn’t as loud as with the original board…
I’m so excited for this! I was able to make an order. Homeassistant is making such a difference here. I was a Mycroft supporter and it’s so great that since they’ve gone away we’ve still got hardware in this space. This hardware makes so much sense too, I hope the voice train keeps rolling!
I followed mycroft for years. It was a bit of a mess. I was sad to see it kinda die.
Same here :(
holds hat to chest Rest in peace good Mycroft
I love that the wakeword is still one of the best we have, my kid will ask me one day why we say “hey Mycroft” and I’ll tell him “it all started with a raspberry pi and a Kickstarter”
my kid will ask me one day why we say “hey Mycroft” and I’ll tell him “it all started with a raspberry pi and a Kickstarter”
😍
I wish I could repurpose my Home Minis to use this. Google butchered those entirely over time, so now they’re practically collecting dust, when I dont use them as an occasional room speaker
Somebody else linked this mobo replacement for the home minis, haven’t looked very closely at it yet myself: https://github.com/justLV/onju-voice
I feel the same but in 2026 and with echo flex.
Ordered. I’m am so excited for this as it seems it could replace my only use case for Google Home / Nest voice.
Was anyone able to order one? I saw this last night and at 2 hours after post, all three us retailers were saying sold out. I suppose it’s a good problem for ha to have.
Edit: one of the retailers updated their message to “ we have sold out of our initial HA Voice stock in 21 minutes”
European retailers seem to be better stocked
Are there difference between this and a 13$ M5 Atom Echo?
Yes
Point given for accuracy of response.
Like…?
Edit: I’ve bought the M5 some months ago but I haven’t had the time to play around with it, should I buy this one and forget about the M5?
I have 2 of the Atoms; they’re janky and need to be reset often, it doesn’t pick up your voice very well, and you can barely hear the responses. 2/7
Thanks. Other 2 devices that I’ve bought out of excitement that will keep taking dust :( I’ll try the “voice” and let’s hope that I’ll have time to set it up! 🙈
I set up the Atom and it isn’t great at picking up voice commands. It also seems to have trouble with stability.
Yeah the mic and speaker on the atom are OK if you are within 2 feet, beyond that they aren’t any good. This looks good
I couldn’t get mine to work properly at all. They’re barely reacting to “okay nabu” and when they do they just misunderstand what I’m saying after the trigger words.
Thanks
Neat! I hope we can add on a speaker, we use ours for playing audio
if you want to use it as a media player, connect a speaker to the included 3.5mm headphone jack and control it with software like Music Assistant.
God idk how I missed that, but thank you
It works well.
I have done the same thing with custom hardware, ESPHome, and routed the output to my old Yamaha AV receiver with an IR blaster in the device for auto source switching and volume control.
I can’t wait for music assistant to integrate Spotify connect because right now you can only play saved playlist/albums or some recent music, no browsing.
A media player component plus microphone plus voice assistant.
I look forward to getting my hands on one of these! Just need to work out where to put it in the house first.
And possibly waiting for a POE version. But that’s a nit-pick.
Is it possible to test this out using a phone or PC? I really like the idea of local voice assist.
IIRC the home assistant android app has VA functionality built in.
Not sure if it works in the same way as this box though.
One of the best parts of HA is the HomeKit bridge: any supported device is exposed to HomeKit …… so if I’m using a personal device, my VA is Siri. Much smoother and more integrated than any of the app VAs. I have it configured to require a click, so it’s not always listening. However the rumors of the upcoming Apple smart home hub are mighty enticing, so we’ll see
I stopped using Google Assistant years ago.
Echo devices are pretty much in every room and a huge privacy issue. Also that’s my one integration with the biggest internet dependency. I don’t know if I can get rid of them, but I’d surely like to try
I’m not into any of the assistant ecosystems, they creep me out too much to have them listening in.
I’ve got my HA instance set up for independent VA integrations and I’ve had a few tries and using pi’s with microphone and speaker hats as custom endpoints, they worked okay-ish but it fell by the wayside eventually and i’ve just been waiting on this kind of first party-promoted kind of announcement to get back in to it.
They also used to creep me out, but Siri was the one that got me. Of the majors, Apple is most concerned about privacy and the only one whose business model is not exploiting us that way. More importantly, as something on personal devices, it’s still useful if you require a click rather than always listening. It becomes normalized, and you no longer consider what you’re giving up
Then we discovered using Alexa as an intercom, and the convenience of always having it listening in every room, and threw out our own privacy. I’d really like to claw this back
Is the whole stack open source or do we have to buy their hardware or license their software?
Their device does look very slick, but I’d like to hack my own system together!
It’s all OSS.
Even better - it’s using ESPHome, which is part of the Home Assistant stack.
ESPHome works from a YAML config file, which ESPHome uses to build firmware images which can be installed OTA (or USB of you must)
No POE = Deal breaker for me
Although it’s a very promising start. Looks great.
It’s USB-C, there are POE adapters. It’s low wattage using an esp32, you could absolutely use a USB c poe splitter for this.
That solves only power, not Ethernet.
What’s POE, precious?
Power over Ethernet
Deploy ‘em, mesh ‘em, stick ‘em in your room
PO-E-yo?
You could always use a POE splitter. I know it’s not the same but it’s better than yet another wall wort.
Still no ethernet.
Well crap. I’d lead with “no Ethernet”.
However, most people wouldn’t use Ethernet for something like this. Would I want it? Yea, but I also realize I’m a fringe case.
It doesn’t even have Ethernet, how could it have poe? Also poe is just stupidly expensive for what it is.
Exactly. No Ethernet + no POE. That’s my point. WiFi only is a big no-no for me.
Ahh I see, I was thinking you already had POE ran somewhere and didn’t have other power options there.
That pretty sweet. The previous open source voice control solution I’d seen (Mycroft?) was like 400 bucks per device.
Might have to grab a mini PC and replace some of this Alexa shit which gets progressively worse since they announced a premium version.
I just need shit to do what it’s told, not try to sell me things.
Only 2.4GHz WiFi?
Why would it need 5GHz? At most it needs to do two audio streams, which aren’t going to need lots of bandwidth
Interference. Especially in apartment complexes, the 2.4Ghz band is busy, causing a lot of packet drops and random disconnects.
I’ve eliminated 2.4GHz wifi in the house for this reason.
The only downside is, I really need to get a couple more WAPs installed.HA has been dead handy when I occasionally need to use an old device, as I can flip the second radio on from a dashboard.
Nice! Been holding off on HA voice stuff, waiting for a more plug and play solution, so I’ve been watching this pretty closely. Managed to get one ordered before they (presumably) go out of stock in the UK. Hoping it arrives soon so I can tinker during the break!
Good news indeed
