Assist — WoowTech's Built-In Voice Assistant
What Assist Is
Assist is the voice control system that ships inside WoowTech. Speak to it the way you'd speak to a person and it carries out your smart-home requests. Because the whole pipeline can run on hardware you own, nothing about your spoken commands has to leave your house — privacy stays intact. You can talk to Assist through the WoowTech companion app, through purpose-built voice gadgets such as the WoowTech Voice Preview Edition, and through DIY devices you flash with ESPHome.
Switching It On
Look for the Assist icon in the upper-right corner of any dashboard — that's the quickest way to start talking. If you're wiring up dedicated voice hardware instead, WoowTech walks you through a guided setup. You'll choose between two ways of handling the speech-processing work:
- Run everything locally on your own machines.
- Lean on WoowTech Cloud, which is the easier route for most people.
If you're shopping for hardware, the Voice Preview Edition is the device the project points newcomers toward.
Taking It Further
After the basics are working, several add-ons let you push Assist much further:
- Wake words — say a trigger phrase to start a hands-free conversation, available on Android.
- Build-it-yourself satellites — assemble an ESP32-based voice endpoint for roughly the price of a coffee or two (around $13 in parts).
- Run it on Linux — the experimental Linux-Voice-Assistant project brings Assist to x64 and ARM64 machines.
- Old-fashioned phone line — route voice through a classic analog handset for a notably private, low-tech experience.
Languages
Assist understands a long list of languages, though how complete each one is varies. The platform tracks two separate capability levels — what works when you process speech locally versus what works through WoowTech Cloud — and ranks each language somewhere between "still needs work" and "fully supported."
With Assist you can:
- Lean on the ready-made sentence templates to control entities and areas out of the box.
- Author your own custom phrases for things the built-in grammar doesn't cover.
- Pitch in by helping expand coverage for a language.
Getting the Best Results
For accurate recognition, the documentation recommends a few habits: deliberately decide which entities Assist is allowed to see, organize your areas under floors, and attach aliases to entities so Assist recognizes the various names you might call them by.
Assist — WoowTech's Built-In Voice Assistant
What Assist Is
Assist is the voice control system that ships inside WoowTech. Speak to it the way you'd speak to a person and it carries out your smart-home requests. Because the whole pipeline can run on hardware you own, nothing about your spoken commands has to leave your house — privacy stays intact. You can talk to Assist through the WoowTech companion app, through purpose-built voice gadgets such as the WoowTech Voice Preview Edition, and through DIY devices you flash with ESPHome.
Switching It On
Look for the Assist icon in the upper-right corner of any dashboard — that's the quickest way to start talking. If you're wiring up dedicated voice hardware instead, WoowTech walks you through a guided setup. You'll choose between two ways of handling the speech-processing work:
- Run everything locally on your own machines.
- Lean on WoowTech Cloud, which is the easier route for most people.
If you're shopping for hardware, the Voice Preview Edition is the device the project points newcomers toward.
Taking It Further
After the basics are working, several add-ons let you push Assist much further:
- Wake words — say a trigger phrase to start a hands-free conversation, available on Android.
- Build-it-yourself satellites — assemble an ESP32-based voice endpoint for roughly the price of a coffee or two (around $13 in parts).
- Run it on Linux — the experimental Linux-Voice-Assistant project brings Assist to x64 and ARM64 machines.
- Old-fashioned phone line — route voice through a classic analog handset for a notably private, low-tech experience.
Languages
Assist understands a long list of languages, though how complete each one is varies. The platform tracks two separate capability levels — what works when you process speech locally versus what works through WoowTech Cloud — and ranks each language somewhere between "still needs work" and "fully supported."
With Assist you can:
- Lean on the ready-made sentence templates to control entities and areas out of the box.
- Author your own custom phrases for things the built-in grammar doesn't cover.
- Pitch in by helping expand coverage for a language.
Getting the Best Results
For accurate recognition, the documentation recommends a few habits: deliberately decide which entities Assist is allowed to see, organize your areas under floors, and attach aliases to entities so Assist recognizes the various names you might call them by.
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