Ditch smart speakers - DIY tutorial for a completely private and local smart voice assistant
Most smart speakers do something useful. They also put a live microphone in your house that streams to someone else's server. This video does the opposite: a voice assistant that runs entirely on hardware you own and never sends a word to the cloud.
We take a Raspberry Pi 5, load Home Assistant OS, run a small version of the free Gemma 4 LLM on Ollama, add wake word detection, speech to text, and text to speech, then hook up an ESP32-S3-BOX-3 as a satellite. The result is a local-only smart speaker. No Amazon, no Google, no Apple, no cloud.
You do not have to use a Raspberry Pi. That is the best part of this project, and I am honest in the video about where the Pi struggles.
WHAT'S COVERED:
Installing Home Assistant OS
Running Ollama with Gemma 4 E2B locally
Whisper (speech to text), Piper (text to speech), and openWakeWord
Wiring the Assist pipeline with the Wyoming protocol
Flashing and configuring the ESP32-S3-BOX-3 satellite
Local on-device wake words vs custom server-side wake words
WORKSHEET (all the commands and copy-paste config):
https://www.dad-the-engineer.com/blog...
GEAR IN THIS VIDEO:
Vemico Raspberry Pi 5 16GB kit: https://amzn.to/44dsddd
ZDE NVMe + PoE HAT kit: https://amzn.to/4f0faAT
ESP32-S3-BOX-3: https://amzn.to/4y3a13A
CHAPTERS:
00:00 - The smart speaker privacy problem with Alexa (Echo), Google (Home), and Apple (HomePod)
01:31 - Make a completely local and private smart speaker with a Raspberry Pi
03:22 - Power the RPi with PoE, and put in an NVMe SSD
04:06 - Get the worksheet!
04:30 - Load Home Assistant OS
05:04 - Load Ollama and they Wyoming components
07:08 - Set up a ESP32-S3-BOX-3 as the smart speaker satellite
09:16 - So... maybe NOT a RPi, but this is a viable project with decent hardware
Thanks to Vemico for providing the Raspberry Pi 5 kit used in this video.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Vemico provided the Raspberry Pi 5 kit used in this video, which did not affect anything I said about it.
#HomeAssistant #RaspberryPi #LocalAI #Privacy #SelfHosted #Ollama #VoiceAssistant #ESP32 #SmartHome #Gemma