HACS, microWakeWord, and Music Assistant projects have joined the Open Home Foundation launched a few months ago to manage open-source projects related to Home Assistant and Smart Home applications in general separating them from Nabu Casa’s commercial activities.
Note the HACS, microWakeWord, and Music Assistant projects will not operate directly under the Open Home Foundation’s umbrella, but they are external projects that the foundation collaborates on since it believes those are projects worth investing in to further develop the Smart Home ecosystem. Let’s have a quick look at the three projects.
- Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) is the most used custom integration for Home Assistant and allows users to easily install custom integrations, cards, and themes.
- Music Assistant gives users control over their media players and audio files handling both local music collection and music streaming services so that users can play any tune anywhere in their house without restrictions.
- microWakeWord is an on-device wake word engine for microcontrollers such as ESP32 that can power onboard wake word on local and open-source voice satellites. Models are suitable for using TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers and the project is also integrated into ESPHome. One hardware device suitable for the project is the tiny M5Stack Atom Echo speaker.
The Open Home Foundation announced the collaboration with these new projects in their newsletter where they also highlighted the risk of going with commercial-only solutions as LG acquired a majority stake in Athom, the makers of Homey, and covered the recent release of Home Assistant 2024.07 which enables users to make use of timers on voice assistants, adds scripting to LLM capabilities, updates ESPHome over-the-air (OTA), etc…
Thanks to Hedda for the tip.
[Update Aug 2: the article has been edited to reflect none of the three projects are directly managed by the Open Home Foundation.]
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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