smiletolerantly

Yep, that's the idea! This post basically boils down to "does this exist for HASS already, or do I need to implement it?" and the answer, unfortunately, seems to be the latter.

Thanks, had not heard of this before! From skimming the link, it seems that the integration with HASS mostly focuses on providing wyoming endpoints (STT, TTS, wakeword), right? (Un)fortunately, that's the part that's already working really well 😄

However, the idea of just writing a stand-alone application with Ollama-compatible endpoints, but not actually putting an LLM behind it is genius, I had not thought about that. That could really simplify stuff if I decide to write a custom intent handler. So, yeah, thanks for the link!!

Thanks for your input! The problem with the LLM approach for me is mostly that I have so many entities, HASS exposing them all (or even the subset of those I really, really want) is already big enough to slow everything to a crawl, and to get bad results from all models I've tried. I'll give the model you mentioned another shot though.

However, I really don't want to use an LLM for this. It seems brittle and like overkill at the same time. As you said, intent classification is a wee bit older than LLMs.

Unfortunately, the sentence template matching approach alone isn't sufficient, because quite frequently, the STT is imperfect. With HomeAssistant, currently the intent "turn off all lights" is, for example, not understood if STT produces "turn off all light". And sure, you can extend the template for that. But what about

• turn of all lights
• turn off wall lights
• turnip off all lights
• off all lights
• off all fights
• ...

A human would go "huh? oh, sure, I'll turn off all lights". An LLM might as well. But a fuzzy matching / closest Levensthein distance approach should be more than sufficient for this, too.

Basically, I generally like the sentence template approach used by HASS, but it just needs that little bit of additional robustness against imperfections.

Thanks for sharing your experience! I have actually mostly been testing with a good desk mic, and expect recognition to get worse with room mics... The hardware I bought are seeed ReSpeaker mic arrays, I am somewhat hopeful about them.

Adding a lot of alternative sentences does indeed help, at least to a certain degree. However, my issue is less with "it should recognize various different commands for the same action", and more "if I mumble, misspeak, or add a swear word on my third attempt, it should still just pick the most likely intent", and that's what's currently missing from the ecosystem, as far as I can tell.

Though I must conceit, copying your strategy might be a viable stop-gap solution to get rid of Alexa. I'll have to pay around with it a bit more.

That all said, if you find a better intent matcher or another solution, please do report back as I am very interested in an easier solution that does not require me to think of all possible sentence ahead of time.

Roger.

Never heard about willow before - is it this one? Seems there is still recent activity in the repo - did the creator only recently pass away? Or did someone continue the project?

How's your experience been with it?

And sure, will do!

That is actually a really interesting approach to moderation, huh.

Lol, exact same situation here.

Quick question, did the migration to continuwuity break calls for you as well?

It's not about prohibiting e2ee; it's about enforcing client-side scanning.

Yes, that also breaks e2ee, but they can still go "nooo! E2ee is still perfectly fine and legal! You know, as long as we get to read anything anyways"

And realistically, this will probably end up being implemented on an OS-level as well. So even using a self-hosted matrix server would not be immune.

Not to mention that both you and your conversation partner needs to take steps to evade this; one party is not sufficient.

Not OP, but: watched Haruhi a while back in English Dub, because there's no German one. It was ok. The main POV character's monotone voice was fitting in a fun way, but almost everyone else still has this fake energy to it (esp Haruhi and Asahina). Really hard to describe.

In general it's baffling to me how fake English dubs sound, especially because there clearly are a lot of talented English voice actors doing the voices for cartoons etc.

I have the privilege of comparing the English Dubs to the German ones for a lot of shows, and it's really interesting how, while the German VAs sound distinctly different from the Japanese originals, they sound natural and not overacted, while the English counterparts almost always sound like they were told "make it sound as fake as possible".

What this lovely person said.

Also, and maybe I am alone here, but when I said learning to write, I really meant with a pen, on paper (or a tablet, I guess), not through an app where you need to smush your fingers in approximately the right place for the line to snap to the correct position; that does not really translate to being able to write.

Me and my GF are currently doing this. Some recommendations from personal experience:

• Pimsleur is really nice for getting from 0 to being able to speak and understand some amount. It's very much less overwhelming than jumping head-first into grammar. You can find torrents for it. It's also a really good way to learn to listen to and speak Japanese out loud, something most other resources lack.
• everyone recommends Genki, and I concurr; it's a good book series on grammar, with plenty exercises. Will really help filling in the gaps where you have gotten a feeling for things with Pimsleur, but are not able to grasp the underlying concepts intuitively.
• don't shy away from Hiragana and Katakana. They are easy to learn (seriously, spend an afternoon on each and then do kana.pro for a week and never look back). Ignoring this will prevent you from using most learning resources.
• use Anki; again, everyone says this, because it's true. You can download a pre-made pack for Genki. 10-15 cards a day are a good leisurely pace, allowing you to tackle a new chapter in Genki approximately every 7-10 days.
• don't fall in the rabbithole of watching YouTube videos on learning Japanese. Just study instead. If there's a concrete thing you struggle with, look for a Video on that topic. Most of the geberal advice videos seem to come from English-speaking folks for whom Japanese is their first foreign language (which is great! Don't get me wrong!), and the resulting information ranges from obvious to questionable.
• decide if you want to learn Kanji (if you don't know them anyways, given your stated experience). I'd recommend it. It's actually quite fun, and if you want to watch Anime in Japanese, there's a good chance you'll have to use Japanese subs for a while to help along anyways...
• most people online seem to suggest only learning to read Kanji, because "you never need to handwrite things today anyways". I call bullshit. It's marginal additional effort, can actually help you with recognition, and if you ever end up needing / wanting to write by hand, you'd have to start all over otherwise.

Lastly, no, it is not a waste of time. Apart from anime, a new language means new ways of thinking, of challenging yourself, of being able to experience people and culture through a new lense, and potentially increasing job opportunities.

Plus if you ever end up visiting Japan, it really comes in handy.

Feel free to ask any followup things that I've forgotten about...

Edit: I forgot to mention: I am nowhere near fluent yet, and do not claim the suggestions above as "ultimate Japanese learner advice" or anything like that.

Also, very quickly you'll start noticing phrases, words, topics when watching anime or japanese videos or music, even if you can't follow the full conversation. That's what really motivated and kept me going early on.

Another thank you! Sumire is exactly what I have been looking for