2024 poll: What do you think of Gladys Assistant?

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Hi everyone !

I’m inviting you to take a short survey to get your opinion :

What do you think of Gladys Assistant ?

This helps me gauge sentiment and understand what could be improved in Gladys !

Thanks again to everyone who will take 2 minutes to answer the survey :pray:

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Sniff !! You forgot Netatmo !! ^^

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I’m adding!!

Edit: it’s fixed!

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I received a comment:

Do you have any points of frustration in using Gladys?
scene programming! just making a simple thermostat that turns a plug on or off is madness

But no contact email! Is the person on the forum and would they like to talk about it?

We can create a dedicated thread to discuss it :slight_smile:

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A return the other way :slight_smile:
I traditionally put up my Christmas tree this weekend :christmas_tree:

I set up the plug, added the two scenes (turn on at sunset and turn off at midnight) in 5 minutes while I was putting my daughter to bed from my phone.
All of that is accessible via Telegram, Google Home (« Hey Google, turn on the tree »), from outside without doing anything else :clap: :clap: :clap:

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Excellent :smiley: I have the same one at home!

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I just spent a good 4 hours responding to everyone who had left their email on the survey, my hands are on fire :smiley:

It’s really nice to have your feedback :slight_smile:

I hope I’ve answered all the questions!

I’ll do another pass over the responses for those who reply later

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Maybe choose a tool outside the GAFAMs? For surveys? That would fit with the services you offer.

See you

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Why not for next time :slight_smile: Do you have a tool to recommend?

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Hi,

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Hello @pierre-gilles,
I confirm @McFlyPartages’s remark.
I didn’t reply because of the form’s source.
Framaform works very well.

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Hi @McFlyPartages and thanks for your message which gives me a chance to follow up: I had thought Gladys was supposed to be as autonomous as possible. Well, overall we’re doing pretty well… But it’s still « Internet-dependent » for lots of things (AI, voice, Tuya, Google, Mac …). Aren’t there more « local » solutions? Could some people share their home-made solutions?

Thanks :slight_smile:

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Actually I see a different answer. We tend to buy lots of hardware and after installing 3-4-5 different apps we ask ourselves how to control them all.

And after a few years (even though I went through it) I don’t think this is the right approach to have in home automation (it’s easy once you have a bit of experience).

For me there are two important protocols: Wi‑Fi for cameras and speakers (only) and Zigbee which lets you cover all home automation use cases. Moreover Zigbee is managed with a USB or Ethernet dongle and makes your home automation local.

Pierre-Gilles’s choice is to make as much hardware as possible compatible with the fewest integrations, in order to avoid a titanic workload that the community cannot maintain (no offense intended to the devs). So he chose to fully develop Zigbee and some mainstream solutions like Tuya, Philips Hue and IKEA, but for my part they are almost unnecessary.

The whole AI thing is another debate, but AI necessarily means cloud — there is no open source solution at the level of current AIs running locally (at least not to my knowledge).

What I find interesting about Gladys (even though unfortunately I don’t use it in production) is the simplicity for the average person, even if that means a subscription, which most viable solutions offer anyway.

If you use Zigbee and Wi‑Fi, without AI you will be cloudless.

I don’t know if I really answered your question.

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For chat-based AI, there are a plethora of open-source solutions (at different levels, we can talk about it again).
Llama, ChatGPT, Mistral, … I use them regularly locally.
As for the voice assistant, we can turn to Whisper (from OpenAI) but it requires a fairly beefy configuration.
A promising option seems to be TensorFlow, which is optimized for mobile devices and therefore less resource-hungry.
We’ll see…

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For AI questions, I have no knowledge, so it’s impossible for me to give an opinion.
Pour ce qui est du coté « cloudless » : c’est le premier point qui m’a attiré sur gladys

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Cloudless, yes, as much as possible locally…
Par contre, ne soyons pas a l’extrême non plus, ne nous privons pas pour respecter ses croyances…

Juste un point qui pour moi est important : si un appareil, fonction ou addon lié a l’extérieur que ce soit par le cloud, un identifiant ou une licence tombe en panne (ou autre), Gladys doit pouvoir fonctionner automatiquement sans…

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You still need a powerful machine, right? Maybe that has evolved.

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Hi @jean_bruder :slight_smile:

On my side I push 100% local solutions as much as possible, and that’s what I apply on my personal setup.

As @McFlyPartages said very well, the recommended protocol is Zigbee for all low-bandwidth devices (smart plug, bulb, sensor, etc…)

For audio and video streams (camera and speakers), it’s Wi‑Fi with open protocols (RTSP for cameras in particular)

That’s what I applied at home, I have 37 Zigbee devices in my apartment (EVERYTHING is Zigbee: switch, bulb, etc… :D), controlled locally with Zigbee2mqtt.

Tuya should really be avoided, it’s the worst in terms of cloud: they change the rules of the game for developers quite regularly, it’s the best way to end up unable to turn on your lights because the Chinese cloud changed its API ^^
We integrated it into Gladys anyway to attract users, but I don’t personally recommend it.

For AI, I disagree with what’s being said: currently, to run AI that rivals ChatGPT you need an ultra‑powerful machine:

  • Nobody here has that hardware (Seriously, who would want to put more than €1000 into their Gladys hardware setup?)
  • In terms of power consumption, it would be ridiculous for everyone to have the computing power of the AI running at home to be used a few times per day, when that power could be pooled among all Gladys users as is currently done. The goal of home automation is also to save energy.
  • The project’s philosophy remains to offer something for the general public, easily usable without configuration. For now, ChatGPT via the cloud is the only one to fulfill that promise.

For the speech synthesis part, if someone finds a local French speech synthesis that rivals what we have in the cloud, I would be the first to integrate it into Gladys. For now, it doesn’t exist :slight_smile:

Note: my opinion on AI is based on the state of the art in December 2024; it may well be outdated in 3 weeks!

For voice assistants, Google and Amazon have chosen to go through the cloud; unfortunately, for someone who wants to use their solutions there’s no choice, you have to be realistic :slight_smile:

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Hello,
I agree with @pierre-gilles. The references I gave above are currently only things to keep an eye on. If we want good responsiveness from our voice AI system, for now there’s unfortunately only the cloud.
The next objective for AI (in my opinion) is to lower the required hardware level rather than try to « do better » by relying heavily on GPU cards.

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