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Home Assistant can handle voice control locally: a microphone captures a request, local speech recognition turns it into text, Home Assistant processes it, and local text-to-speech can speak a reply. A mini PC can host Home Assistant and the voice services, but it is only the computer behind the setup; you still need a microphone and speaker, and the exact model and hardware in the title’s personal setup are not specified here.
What “without the internet” means for a local voice assistant
Home Assistant’s local voice pipeline can keep spoken commands on your home network: speech-to-text, request handling, and text-to-speech can all run locally. That describes the voice path, not every service in a smart home. Whether the whole setup remains useful during a complete internet outage depends on the devices, integrations, voice endpoint, and optional services you use.
The processing stages have distinct jobs. A microphone captures speech; a local speech-to-text engine transcribes it; Home Assistant interprets the request and controls an exposed device; and a text-to-speech engine can produce a spoken response. Wyoming connects Home Assistant to compatible local services such as Whisper, Speech-to-Phrase, Piper, and openWakeWord. Those services can run on the Home Assistant host or on another computer on the same network. Home Assistant’s fully local voice guide and its Wyoming Protocol documentation describe the architecture.
Speech recognition: fast commands or open-ended transcription?
Choose the speech recognizer according to the kinds of requests you expect and the hardware available. A language model is not required for ordinary smart-home commands.
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| Option | What it does | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Speech-to-Phrase | Recognizes a supported, bounded set of commands. | Home Assistant describes it as very fast, including on Home Assistant Green or a Raspberry Pi 4, but open-ended tasks such as naming timers, shopping lists, and broadcasts are not available out of the box. |
| Whisper | Attempts open-ended speech transcription. | It supports a wider range of spoken requests, but asks more of the host hardware and is a better fit for a more powerful computer or a setup paired with an LLM. |
Home Assistant’s local voice guide publishes illustrative processing figures: about 8 seconds for incoming voice commands on a Raspberry Pi 4 using Whisper, and under 1 second on an Intel NUC. It also reports that a Raspberry Pi generates 1.6 seconds of medium-quality Piper speech per second. These are Home Assistant’s published examples, not measurements of the mini PC in the title or independent benchmarks; results depend on the hardware, models, and configuration. Home Assistant also cautions that voice quality varies by language. See its local voice setup guide for context.
Where an LLM fits—and where it does not
An LLM is an optional conversation layer, separate from speech recognition and speech synthesis. Home Assistant can process standard home-control requests without one. Adding a local model can make interactions more open-ended, but it does not replace the rest of the voice pipeline.
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Home Assistant’s Ollama integration connects to an Ollama server running on macOS, Linux, or Windows. Device control is experimental, and only models with tool support can control devices. The model can see only the entities exposed to it; it should not be treated as unrestricted control of the whole home. Home Assistant recommends exposing fewer than 25 entities when experimenting with local Ollama models and notes that smaller models are more likely to make mistakes. The Ollama integration documentation explains these limitations.
What the mini PC does—and what it does not do
The mini PC is a compute host: it can run Home Assistant and local voice services. Home Assistant lists mini PCs and NUCs as suitable hardware, including for people who want to run Home Assistant alongside other services. The category alone is not enough to recommend a specific model or promise a particular response time. The published NUC result above is an example in Home Assistant’s Whisper comparison, not a guarantee for every NUC or mini PC. Home Assistant’s hardware FAQ covers host options.
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A computer in a cupboard does not provide a room-level microphone or speaker. You also need an endpoint through which someone can speak and hear the answer. Home Assistant supports its companion app, dedicated Voice Preview Edition hardware, and custom ESPHome devices. A phone is a way to try Assist using hardware you may already own; dedicated or self-built voice hardware can provide a fixed room interface. Home Assistant’s Assist page describes the available approaches.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Make local control more dependable
Clear device organization helps both Assist and any model you connect to it. Assign devices to areas, use names people will naturally say, and add aliases for household members who call the same device by different names. For an LLM conversation agent, scripts are exposed as tools rather than entities, so useful descriptions matter. Home Assistant’s Assist best practices provide further guidance.
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- Expose only the entities the assistant needs, especially when enabling experimental LLM device control.
- Start with a small set of clearly named devices and verify the assistant’s actions before expanding access.
- Decide whether bounded commands or open-ended transcription matters more before choosing Speech-to-Phrase or Whisper.
- Keep the voice endpoint in the plan: the host runs the services, while a microphone and speaker make the interaction possible.
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