Assist

Home Assistant’s own Assist can already turn a light on. It matches your sentence against a list of templates and runs the one that fits. Say something it has no template for and you get “Sorry, I couldn’t understand that”. Point Assist at an LLM and that stops being true. “It’s too dark in the living room” works. The catch is that the model has to call Home Assistant’s tools correctly, and plenty of local models can’t. I ran three models against the same 18 commands to see which ones can. ...

A Home Assistant voice assistant needs three parts. Something to turn speech into text, something to turn a reply back into speech, and Assist in the middle to work out what you meant. The first two can run on plain CPU in Docker, so nothing you say has to leave the house. I built the whole stack from scratch on 11 October 2026 on Home Assistant 2026.10.1, ran text and spoken commands through it, and timed the result. This post has the compose file, the settings, the numbers and the two things that tripped me up. ...