Many of you would surely like to use Home Assistant as a voice assistant and be able to address it anywhere in the house, just like IronMan. In this article, I will explain how you can control Home Assistant by voice at low cost and output the spoken text via Google Home.
First, you need a device that is as small as possible and has a built-in microphone. I use an M5Stack Atom Echo*. It is small and even has a built-in speaker. The speaker is quite nice for testing, but too quiet for use in the home. That’s why I use my Google Home Mini as the output device instead.
To use this, you will need:
- M5Stack Atom Echo*
- Google Home (or another audio device (Alexa devices* seem to have a problem here)
- ChatGPT Integration (Optional, but makes it a lot better)
Wyoming Protocol IntegrationBetter: Elevenlabs (for Text-to-Speech)- ESPHome Integration
In this article, I would like to focus exclusively on configuring the M5Stack Atom Echo. Setting up the other requirements would go beyond the scope of this article.
Connect your Atom Echo to your computer via USB and go to this website. Click on ‘Connect’ and install the firmware. Then connect the device to your Wi-Fi.
Open ESPHome Builder and click on ‘New Device’, click on ‘Continue’ and assign a name, then click on “Next”. Connect the M5Stack Atom Echo via USB to the device on which Home Assistant is installed. Select ‘ESP32’. An encryption key will be displayed. Save this, as we will need it shortly. Click on ‘Install’ and select ‘Plug into the computer running ESPHome Device Builder’ and select the M5Stack device. Select your Wi-Fi and start the installation. A .yaml file has been created in the background. Once the installation is complete, click on ‘Edit’ in the generated YAML file and delete everything. Then copy the code into it, which can be purchased below. Make sure you enter your saved encryption key under ‘API KEY’. Also enter your Google Home (or another media player) in line 104.
Now click on ‘Save’ and then on “Install”. After a few minutes, the installation is complete and you can start the assistant with the wake word ‘Ok Nabu’. You can change the wake word in line 4 of the YAML code.
Here you can download the code for the assist with external media player:
If you have an LG TV with webOS and it is integrated into Home Assistant, you can use this code to additionally display the output on the television:
