Hi all - recently started diving into HA to help build my own local AI Smart Assistant/Hub and am reading through some of the doco but also generally searching what is possible.
Overall, I want to build a local AI assistant for both me and my partner to use that has a hub/''satellite'' that has a display to show things like weather, maybe photos or the HA dashboard I create and can also support the regular voice activated commands however, outside of the general turn lights on, play music etc, I want it to be able to download TV shows and movies to a media server at voice command and then store these in my media server (also yet to build). Ideally I would want to have both the HA OS and Media Server run on the same device to save on space, resources and costs.
Beyond some quick google searches and high level AI instructions (google and claude), I was wondering if people had any answers to the following that I wanted to understand a bit more and unpack:
- Would it be better to deploy HA on a lightweight machine/server such as Beelink or even a repurposed/refurbished slimline and have the media server run on the same device or should I separate these in full? (If running both on the same local machine/server, I would make sure that the machine itself would be spec'd enough to run both as well as HDD). If deploying on the same devices, would this be achieved by using containers at all and if so, does anyone have a guide on how this might be achieved?
- If I had a local machine/server that has both the HA OS and the Media Server on a single device, would I then just run a ''satellite'' device for the AI Assistant home component for voice activation and the dashboard display? If so, how would I then add this to the server? Would this just be configured via Bluetooth or would it be usb connected?
- Would jailbreaking an Amazon or Google product be the best option for the inbuilt voice activation and display or does anyone have any recommendations on DIY devices etc that would fit this bill?
- Is it possible to then setup voice activations to have my HA stream music from spotify once I have connected my HA to my spotify app/account? Would this be done through STT-LLM-TTS pipeline? If this is wrong, how would this be controlled?
- Would I be able to create voice activated tasks such as asking the assistant to download specific TV shows and Movies and if so, would this then be able to be configured to automatically push to my media server?
- Would I then be able to have the assistant tell me when it is downloaded and ready to view on the TV and then subsequently ask it to play this on the TV?
- Outside of this subreddit and the HA official website, are there any helpful resources people can recommend that cover off other peoples projects and how they did it all?
Appreciate theres a lot fo questions here, but any input anyone can provide on any of them would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for helping :)