Friday, January 17: Let's take stock! Review, growth & projects for 2025 🚀

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Hello everyone, and happy New Year to all :partying_face:

I’m super excited to see you for a special live on YouTube on Friday, January 17 at 9:00 PM (French time) to take stock of an exceptional 2024 and to share with you my ambitions for 2025!

The past year was a real milestone for Gladys Assistant, with great progress, an increasingly active community, and promising growth.

And as always, I’ll reveal everything to you with full transparency:

:backhand_index_pointing_right: The standout highlights of 2024 and how they helped strengthen the project

:money_bag: The complete financial report of Gladys Assistant SAS (because transparency is a core value of the project)

:crystal_ball: My vision and upcoming developments for 2025, notably around Matter, UX, and the launch of new products

The link to the YouTube live is here:

:link: https://www.youtube.com/live/_bmsWALVePc

(Remember to hit the bell :bell:)

It will also be an opportunity to chat with you live. Ask all your questions or comments in reply to this post and I will take the time to answer them during the live.

I really can’t wait to share all this with you, and to continue growing Gladys together in 2025 :rocket:

See you very soon!

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Hello everyone! :slight_smile:

We’ll meet tonight at 9 PM on YouTube here for the live:

https://www.youtube.com/live/_bmsWALVePc

See you later :wink:

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Thanks to everyone who came :slight_smile:

I wrote a more detailed article on the blog with the full 2024 review, and my ideas for 2025:

If you have any comments, don’t hesitate!

The replay of the live stream is available here: https://youtube.com/live/_bmsWALVePc

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Bravo @pierre-gilles pour tout le travail fait en 2024 ! et je n’oublie pas la communauté, loin de là :wink:

Some ideas for a hardware (HW) offering, somewhat offbeat I admit — but why go with refurbished products?
Dell OptiPlex Micro 7040 PCs or equivalent Lenovo and others. I’ve seen plenty of listings on Leboncoin (lbc) selling pallets of this kind of equipment. You put 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD (SATA or NVMe), and at least a 4‑core CPU, and that makes a great starter offer.
It’s trendy to reuse and refurbish (carbon footprint, and all that).

I see a few points for the company: you need an invoice for the purchase (VAT?) and a customer invoice (with VAT on that one). You should discuss it with your accountant to see if it’s feasible.

One important point, and here I’m talking about non-tinkerers (do they exist at Gladys :wink: ?) : delivering a mini PC with Gladys installed on it would be a must-have (even if you « deliver » the training where you explain how to do it).
I can understand that prep takes time but once you have a finalized image, a dd write to an SSD over USB and it’s done. It’s an idea, not the definitive solution.

Again, well done for the investments you’re making :blush:

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Thanks for the little shout-out :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
Does my installation account for 7% on its own, or have you observed several of them in Canada?

As always, I’m eager to follow developments in 2025 — it looks promising! And, as far as possible, to play a part at my level.

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It’s an interesting idea, but honestly, it’s a completely different job :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:.

Currently, it’s my supplier who handles the entire process: shipping, after-sales service (SAV), warranty, etc. On my side, I just place the order, and the product is shipped directly to the end customer, without me having to handle anything. In case of a problem, my supplier also takes care of everything.

Don’t forget that I only dedicate 2.5 days per week to Gladys and that I work alone. My main objective therefore remains to focus on what I do best: software development :smiley:.

Offering refurbished PCs would require a full-time investment and would encroach too much on my other priorities: Gladys development, moderating the forum, recording tutorials for training, creating YouTube content, development and support for Gladys Plus, etc.

It’s a project I dream of in the long term, but we’re still far from it for now! :blush:

With the current state of open-source home automation (like Zigbee2mqtt) and the Gladys product, offering a turnkey product already installed would be a real time bomb in terms of support. The product is simply not yet suited to a too « mainstream » audience (Mrs. Michu). In case of an issue with the installation, she would be completely helpless.

Releasing a turnkey product too early would risk harming the Gladys experience, because there would be a mismatch between the expectations of that target audience and the product’s current capabilities.

Since 2020, I’ve been making every decision possible to bring us closer to that ideal. I’m convinced that the arrival of Matter will help us move in that direction, but for now, it’s not yet a reality. :blush:

Over the last 15 days, there were 77 instances in the US, and 15 in Canada :slight_smile:

For comparison, 262 in France.

Total: 634 worldwide!

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Thank you for this summary and for the work of the entire community over the year!
About voice AI that runs locally, a model has just been released: hexgrad/Kokoro-82M · Hugging Face
It’s not bad for something that runs on a low-end CPU but I don’t know if it reaches the level of quality you wanted @pierre-gilles

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The voice is not bad but I tested fairly simple sentences and there are pronunciation mistakes that make understanding difficult.

Example: « Attention, the level of CO2 in the living room is very high »

On ElevenLabs, which we currently use, « CO2 » is pronounced correctly, but on Kokoro it’s pronounced « KO-2 ».

Also it’s marked as « experimental », to be continued :slight_smile: I’m confident that we’ll have a stable model locally one day!