Yes, it is possible by installing the Wyoming Satellite software on the Mark II. All the pieces are there, it's just missing some easy-to-install firmware.
Source: I worked at Mycroft on the Mark II and am now the voice guy for Nabu Casa (Home Assistant).
I just checked out that project, thank you! But, I don't see any instructions at all for even getting started, even after searching the issues. Is there a good place to find information? When you say "missing some easy-to-install firmware" it sounds like there is a big piece missing, no?
I'm the author of Piper; it is a successor to Larynx (originally named Larynx 2). Piper uses the same underlying model as Mimic 3, which I developed before joining Mycroft. However, Piper uses a different library to get word pronunciations, so the voices aren't compatible between the two projects.
It's been an awesome year so far with Nabu Casa, and I'm very fortunate to be able to work on something I love. I hope to contribute to the open source voice space for many years to come :)
Coauthor of the blog post here. You're right, I said it on the live stream we had today but forgot to mention it in the blog post: the i5 is from a Lenovo ThinkCentre M72e.
They're available refurbished for less than the cost of a Pi 4 these days, so it seemed to be a good comparison!
Man, I switched my home assistant box from a raspberry pi to one of these machines, because I wanted the raspberry pi to run one of my 3D printers, and it has made such a beautiful difference in terms of the snappiness of everything home assistant does.
I super recommend it, if you can afford the extra 10 to 15 watts of power.
The ThinkCentre runs at 65W, a Pi4 runs at ~8W. There's a slight energy crisis (in Europe), so you need to optimise for workloads that can run at lower power levels. Just, voice in my opinion, does not justify 65W constant draw.
No personal offense, this is a very common affectation that has just personally been a bugaboo for me lately due to technical documentation containing these non-technical statements.
Home Assistant and Rhasspy 3 will be able to share voice services thanks to the shared Wyoming protocol.
Rhasspy 3 will have more options, including lots of experimental services.
Our goal is local voice control of your devices in your native language (no Internet required). Hardware is still an open question, but I believe we will succeed due to our focus on a limited domain (IoT) and large open source community.
I'm a home assistant user that's been following along with the year of voice. I played a little with Almond and some with Rhasspy; what's the best way to get up and running right now? I've been using my arch desktop with a mic (running through pipewire) as my primary hardware, not scared of deploying to a pi or similar but I don't have one to spare right now.
