Voice assistants then and now

We’re revisiting Courtenay, who was last spoke to on Episode 45 six years ago. She’s here to share six years of Home Assistant progress: moving from Raspberry Pi to Home Assistant Blue, mastering the Energy Dashboard with MQTT, surviving cloud outages on Tuya, and restoring from backups in minutes.

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Chapters

00:00:00 Welcome

00:01:04 2019 setup recap

00:03:31 Hardware: Blue and N2+

00:06:00 Real‑time energy tracking

00:12:00 Breaker chaos, disaggregation

00:16:30 Dashboards and thermostat

00:22:00 Tuya cloud lighting

00:27:30 Offline behavior, habits

00:29:30 Less YAML, more UI

00:33:30 Backups and restore

00:38:30 Z‑Wave LR range talk

00:41:30 LoRa and Meshtastic

00:42:00 Hubs, Matter/Thread woes

00:48:00 Voice assistants: then vs now

00:51:00 Everyday control patterns

00:55:00 Advice for new users

00:59:30 Recorder and data

01:03:07 Six‑year roadmap and robots

01:06:14 Wrap‑up and contact info

This episode was made possible thanks to our sponsors

Home Assistant Cloud by Nabu Casa

Easily connect to Google and Amazon voice assistants for a small monthly fee that also supports the Home Assistant project. Configuration is via the User Interface so no fiddling with router settings, dynamic DNS, or YAML.

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Products Discussed

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B: https://amzn.to/43Dppq4

Ecobee Thermostat: https://amzn.to/3XtOTCR

Shelly energy monitoring clamps: https://amzn.to/488TjDX

Sense Home Energy Monitor: https://amzn.to/4re7oss

Home Assistant Connect ZWA2 (Z‑Wave radio): https://amzn.to/3MfPzsP

Meshtastic LoRa nodes: https://amzn.to/4ihcSyy

Hosts

Phil Hawthorne

Website

Smart Home Products

Twitter: @philhawthorne

Bluesky: @philhawthorne.com

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Rohan Karamandi

Website

Smart Home Products

Twitter: @rohank9

Buy Rohan a Coffee

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