Home Assistant

And the winners of our voice assistant community contest are šŸ„ ...

Jean-LoĆÆc Pouffier Comments

2023 was the Year of the Voice. It was a yearly goal to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. We organized a contest to celebrate what our voice assistants could enable with the community. The contest entries have been all amazing, the work produced outstanding. Personally, I learnt so much just reviewing all the entries, I learnt that our community is so creative and relentless. My personal project list grew quite a lot as I want to implement half of the entries at home! Today is the day we announce the winners!

It is important to note that while Year of the Voice is over, voice is now part of Home Assistant just like automations or dashboards. The sharp focus is over, but voice will get updates forever, just like every other part of Home Assistant.

The contest was split into 4 categories:

  • Most creative satellite ideas
  • Best Starting Guides
  • Best events organized, best group effort
  • Best voice experiences

You can read more about the contest specifics in the blog post announcing the contest.

Due to a lack of entries, we removed the category ā€œBest events organized, best group effortā€.

Most creative satellite ideas

The competition was the most fierce in that category!

On the one hand, it pleases me to see how many of you managed to create something unique, quirky, and creative using our voice assistant functionalities. This means that our voice assistant is indeed aligned with our value of Choice. On the other hand, it made picking a winner even more complex šŸ˜¬.

So without further ado, the winner of the ā€œmost creative satellite ideasā€ category is dirtyharriv and their Bender Voice Assistant.

Congratulations on your entry! Your voice assistant embodies perfectly what we think when we talk about choice: Custom wake word, custom voice, in-character responses, a beautiful 3D printed case, LEDsā€¦ Itā€™s perfect!

Dirtyharriv wins a Home Assistant Green, a Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a spot on our livestream on the 10th of April to present their project!

We also have a lot of runners-up in this category, they all win a Home Assistant SkyConnect!

Best Starting Guides

Again, lots of entries in this category, it amazes me to see how many of you tried hard to provide something that could be re-used by other members of the community, whether it was a device that you can purchase, hack, or build yourself, or a series of videos you can follow to set something up in your own home.

Building something is already hard, but building something to offer it to others is even harder. This category was, to me, the category with the biggest amount of work done by the contestants, congratulations to you all.

The winner of the ā€œbest starting guidesā€ category is landonr with their homeThing S3.

The homeThing blew us away, itā€™s an iPod-style remote for your home that ticks so many boxes: Rotary dial, screen, IR blaster, microphone, speaker, battery ā€¦

Everything is open source, up to the custom PCB that landonr created. The ESPHome configuration is open source. This is the perfect device to have in your home!

Landonr wins a Home Assistant Green, a Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a spot on our livestream on the 10th of April to present their project!

We also have a few runners-up in this category, they all win a Home Assistant SkyConnect!

Best voice experiences

This category was not about hardware, it was about providing the best software experience that elevates the voice experience in Home Assistant. I had the most fun reviewing this category because most of the entries can be re-used at home without any particular hardware! Instant improvement of my system!

The winner of the ā€œbest voice experiencesā€ category is dinki with their View Assist.

View Assist is a complete UI for Assist running on an old Android tablet that tries to replicate the UI of devices such as an Amazon Echo Show. It is very complete and well-documented, and I think can be a candidate for fully replacing a screen-based voice assistant such as an Amazon Echo Show or a Google Nest Hub.

Dinki wins a Home Assistant Green, a Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a spot on our livestream on the 10th of April to present their project!

We also have a lot of runners-up in this category, they all win a Home Assistant SkyConnect!

I want to give a small shout-out to one of the runner-up: Lajos and their improvement of the S3 Box firmware to display text, you did something I personally considered impossible in the S3 box, and never tried to implement it because of this false assumption. Seeing your entry pushed me to give it a try and I am happy to announce that very soon, the official voice assistant firmware for the S3 boxes will allow everyone to display the spoken text of the request and the response on the screen.

Community choice

We also asked you to vote for your favorite entry, the votes were fierce but one entry skyrocketed above the rest.

It is my pleasure to announce that the community vote is Rellu and their HA-Visual-Voice-Assistant.

HA-Visual-Voice-Assistant is an impressive voice experience that creates on-the-fly AI-generated videos of characters as visual feedback for Assist. The video that Rellu provides in his entry is really complete, with the ability to change characters and language directly via voice. Great job!

Rellu wins a Home Assistant Green, a Home Assistant SkyConnect, and a spot on our livestream on the 10th of April to present their project!

Thank you

Thank you to the Home Assistant community for subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud to support Year of the Voice and the development of Home Assistant, ESPHome, and other projects in general.

We will contact all winners and runners-up in the next few days to organize shipping. We are looking forward to having the winners on the livestream with us on the 10th of April.

I hope you enjoyed this first Home Assistant contest, rest assured that it wonā€™t be the last.

JLo, Over and Out.