I found a funny article in Twitter https://thebolditalic.com/you-are-now-fully-optimized-716f4… about IOT, Software engineers life and automation. Btw, see @lyashenkogs. So I was interested how it’s going with home assistances now.
Time to time I use Google assistance on my Xiomi Mi Max to translate something to Russian, check the weather, convert currency, look at nearest events in a calendar, build a direction on a map or just google for some technical or not very term.
The biggest cons - this doesn’t work from a locked screen on a smartphone, except you are Google Pixel owner ($649 for a basic version).
So for me, it will be good to have a home assistance like GA but on a MacBook.
Why I don’t consider Google Home as an option.
No screen -> no visual output or possibility to open a wiki article for example
1. No keyboard in case if need to input a request manually
2. A highly proprietary system with no clean way to integrate with
3. There is no SDK for Google Home as a device.
4. When developing custom action you are locked with google infrastructure and firebase. https://developers.google.com/actions/get-started/
Amazon Echo
I didn’t use Echo but seems like it doesn’t work well with Google services out of the box. Developing Alexa skills involves AWS Lambda so I can get a vendor lock eventually. I’m sure there are workarounds, but I don’t see some very popular ones.
A website when you can try Alexa online https://echosim.io/ didn’t work for mine. I wasn’t able even to trigger some basic functionality!
Siri
Very limited. https://9to5mac.com/…/how-siri-works-in-ios-10-for-third-p…/
Ok Google on MacBook
Hopefully, I found a video with detailed instructions how to use OK Google from a MacBook using voice, and it worked for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7dYKFukPfo
What it does and doesn’t
It does everything except triggering actions like playing music, adding events to a calendar or reminders. In this case, you need GA which doesn’t have an official desktop version. Only an API or an SDKhttps://developers.google.com/assistant/sdk/overview which will eventually look like a console app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UINBWxs6SeI
MacAssistant
Technically, it’s a Swift based wrapper, suspiciously similar to Siri, with very limited functions and bugs. Also, it requires macOS Sierra. I think the idea is great, but implementation has a lot of work to do yet.
https://github.com/vanshg/MacAssistant
Open source solutions
I didn’t test it yet. And it’s written in javascript. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEnu-aotG2s. https://github.com/TheAdrianProject/AdrianSmartAssistant
Even Mark Zuckerberg build own home assistance. Yeh yeh, without any other engineers) and surprisingly there is no open source code) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvimBPJ3XGQ
Summary
I think there is no proper desktop home assistant for mere mortals yet. All market solutions seem beta versions and are very vendor specific. Personally, I will wait till something proper appeared at market and use GA as it is now from a smartphone and a MacBook.
p.s I will appreciate any kind of constructive critics about the article or yours ideas about home assistances in practice.