One day of comparing speech-to-text, voices and AI ‘brains’ for a Home Assistant voice assistant, with Claude doing the measuring. The fast, natural setup on a Mac Studio lost to an old Dell OptiPlex: GigaAM turns speech into text in 0.2–0.3 s, Silero speaks in about 0.2 s, my own sentences answer most requests at home, and ChatGPT (or a small local model when the internet is down) only gets what’s left.
The second half of my JARVIS weekend. The company behind my ventilation’s app went bankrupt, and the only control left was a panel on the wall. On Sunday Claude and I decoded the panel’s cable, put a small Wi-Fi adapter on a socket nobody used, and now Home Assistant sets the fan speed from the CO2 in the rooms.
The city’s sealed radio sits on my water meter and covers part of the digits. A small camera in a 3D-printed holder reads them anyway, and Home Assistant fixes the one digit the camera keeps getting wrong.
