this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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Buy this. You can use your own voice processing on another machine on your network. You could even hook it up to your Ollama. I have it and it's completely replaced Google Home for voice control.
How is the speaker in that? I have some atoms and the speaker sucks. Thinking about buying a bunch of these Google devices and replacing the PCB but I'd rather save the time if something like this actually has good sound.
For music, it's not great. For voice, it's pretty good. It's decently loud and legible. There's no bass. The mics however are pretty good. As far as I've read, you can't get the mics to work well unless they're tuned for that speaker in physical placement and hardware/firmware. The HA speaker uses the same kind of DSP chip that makes it possible for it to hear well in worse than ideal conditions which makes speech recognition work so well. So yeah, if you don't wanna faff with stuff and you don't care about music, just get it. It's got 3.5mm TRS out if you wanna hook a proper speaker for music. The DAC is probably not amazing for HiFi but should you want to hook up something like a JBL Charge, I imagine it should work. In fact I'm planning to do this in another room where I used to use a larger Google Nest speaker for music.
Does it work with music assistant in HA? Thanks for the response btw
It does! I have my bedroom one controlled through it and even showing up as a play target for Spotify Connect. I've got my speakers I was plugging into my phone to play music before, or into a Raspi briefly, plugged into the 3.5mm jack on that one.
My kitchen one I just leave as-is. I DID modify the ESPHome firmware on each, extending to add an OLED (I think) clock display that also shows remaining time for timers in numbers. I do really like the LED ring animation for timers built-in though, it's pretty slick!
Not sure what a music assistant is. The speaker acts like a media player in Home Assistant. Actually now that I think about it, I don't know how I'd play music on it. It doesn't seem to do cast. 🤭