Any experiences with a self-hosted assistant like the modern Google Assistant? Looking for something LLM-powered that is smarter than older assistants that would just try to call 3rd party tools directly and miss or misunderstand requests half of the time.
I’d like integration with a mobile app to use it from the phone and while driving. I see Home Assistant has an Android Auto integration. Has anyone used this, or another similar option? Any blatant limitations?
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Home Assistant can absolutely do that. If you are ok with simple intent based phrasing it’ll do it out of the box. If you want complex understanding and reasoning you’ll have to run a local LLM, like Llama, on top of it
yeah, that’s what I’m looking for. Do you know of a way to integrate ollama with HA?
I don’t think there’s a straightforward way like a HACS integration yet, but you can access Ollama from the web with open-webui and save the page to your homepage:
Just be warned, you’ll need a lot of resources depending on which model you choose and its parameter count (4B, 7B etc) – Gemma3 4B uses around 3GB storage, 0.5GB RAM and 4GB of VRAM to respond. It’s a compromise as I can’t get replacement RAM, and tends to be wildly inaccurate with large responses. The one I’d rather use, Dolphin-Mixtral 22B, takes 80GB storage and 17GB min RAM, the latter of which I can’t afford to take from my other services.
I don’t like the guy’s breathless over-enthusiasm, but NetworkChuck has a video on how to integrate LLM-based voice assistants with HomeAssistant using Whisper and Ollama.
ah yes, I stopped watching the guy because of that and the clickbait, but he does make some interesting content sometimes.
HA with local LLM on Ollama. Can imtegrate the Android app as the default phone assistant. I don’t think it can use a wake word on the phone though. I invoke it by holding the power button, like a walkie.
Try ollama.com you can download and try whatever you want. Quality is mostly how much VRAM your video card has.
Maybe things have improved but the last time I tried the Home Assistant er- assistant, it was garbage at anything other than the most basic commands given perfectly.
You gotta hook it to a local LLM. Then it’s boss.
Any pointers where to begin?
Install Ollama on a machine with fast CPU or GPU and enough RAM. I currently use Qwen3 that takes 8GB RAM. Runs on an NVIDIA GPU. Running it on CPU is also fast enough. There’s a 4GB version which is also decent for device control. Add Ollama integration in Home Assistant. Connect it to the Ollama on the other machine. Add Ollama as conversation agent to the Home Assistant’s voice assistant. Expose HA devices to be controllable. That’s about it on high level.
But what’s acting like the little box in your house that listens like an Amazon echo?
