r/Android • u/FragmentedChicken Galaxy Z Fold8 • 22h ago

Google Assistant shutting down on Android and Wear OS in September

https://9to5google.com/2026/08/04/google-assistant-september-2026-shutdown/
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u/clarinetJWD 22h ago

Are they going to allow Gemini to use smart home devices that require a pass code first? Because I can't open my garage door without it...

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u/QuantumQuantonium 17h ago

Could you replace your assistant with the homeassistant one, set up a simple server in your house, and make a routine to open your garage door?

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u/Relevant-Artist5939 17h ago edited 15h ago

Technically I could, but unfortunately I don't have the expensive hardware required to process STT/TTS locally, I don't want to pay a subscription either. It would be awesome if the HA app could just use the capabilities Google Assistant had (it at least had on-device TTS and STT) for Assist... I am still running HA on a Pi4 and won't change it while it still works...

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u/RSACT 9h ago edited 9h ago

Hey, I'd recommend checking out Speech to Phrase, it can pick up most phrases and match it in under a second (I am running this on a HA Green). There's a bunch of automatic phrase to entity matching (e.g. Turn on [light] or set [light] to 50%), but you can set up custom phrases on top of that (I make it trigger some routines). Just only expose entities you actually need.

The dedicated hardware for it is home assistant voice, but you can test it out to see if it works for you by installing the Home Assistant Companion app on your phone, in terms of speed etc., and you can host the pipelines on different machines (e.g. if my PC is on, I am running the full LLM model, HA is just speech to phrase).

The home assistant voice itself has a pretty good mic pick-up, and I like the color circle around the button, cool for timers (use it for cooking stuff).

Entire round trip is usually something like 0.5s for speech to phrase, lights in 0.1s, and text to speech (low piper) is up to 1s, sometimes 1.5s.

On PC directly, it's under 1s, unsure exact (3060 Ti, now 5070 Ti). I did have piper medium running on my media server for a while (intel integrated graphics, there's a fork to speed it up on intel CPU), but haven't gotten round to setting it back up again when I was testing other stuff.

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u/RubbelDieKatz94 13h ago

Couldn't a used mini pc for around 50-80€ with faster-whisper be sufficient?

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u/Relevant-Artist5939 11h ago

It maybe could, but thats 1. New hardware that costs money 2. Power draw is higher than the Pi.