HACS, Music Assistant, and microWakeWord Join Forces with Open Home Foundation

The Open Home Foundation is working with more partners like HACS, Music Assistant, and microWakeWord to make smart homes better. They’re focused on keeping things private and letting users decide how their smart homes work. They want to ensure Home Assistant stays free and can’t be controlled by investors. The latest update adds new features, and they’re even working on making energy more efficient.

The HACS, microWakeWord, and Music Assistant projects will not operate directly under the Open Home Foundation’s umbrella. Still, they are external projects that the foundation collaborates on since it believes they are worth investing in to develop the Smart Home ecosystem further.

HACS is a widely used tool that is built for Home Assistant users to modify their setups with custom integrations, cards, and themes. Music Assistant provides centralized control over media players and audio files, enabling playback of both local and streaming music throughout your home. microWakeWord, an on-device wake word engine designed for microcontrollers like the ESP32, enables onboard wake word capabilities for local and open-source voice assistants. Compatible with TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers, microWakeWord is also integrated into ESPHome. One hardware option well-suited for this project is the compact M5Stack Atom Echo speaker.

The Open Home Foundation shared their collaborations with these new projects in their newsletter, where they also emphasized the potential risks of relying solely on commercial smart home solutions. This concern was highlighted by LG’s recent acquisition of a majority stake in Athom, the creators of Homey. The newsletter also covered the latest release of Home Assistant 2024.07, which introduces new features like support for voice assistants, scripting capabilities for language models, and over-the-air updates for ESPHome devices.

Thanks to cnx-software

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