- Voice without Home Assistant: a device can now answer on its own. What you say goes to a speech-to-text server (faster-whisper), the words to a chat model you run (llama.cpp, Ollama, anything with an OpenAI-style API), and the answer to a text-to-speech server (Piper). The model acts through the device's own abilities: timers, alarms, the radio, the volume, the calendar, calling another device, the weather here or anywhere. Set it up on the setup page's Sound tab. Home Assistant's Assist pipeline stays the default.
- Web search for the voice assistant: with a SearXNG server set, it can look up what a home model can't know, like a game's date or a store's hours, and reads the page it finds. It's told to answer only from what the pages say.
- Follow-ups in a row: a setting next to Follow-up time that limits how many times the device keeps listening after a reply before it waits for the wake word again.
- Leaving Home Assistant: the leave_home_assistant action disconnects a device from Home Assistant for good (for a device you're giving away), and the setup page can let a new household's Home Assistant add it, in a 15-minute window. A device with no Home Assistant access no longer waits on its start-up screen forever.
- Updates can install automatically, overnight while nothing is playing (a switch, off unless turned on), and the setup page has an Updates box with Install now.
- Weather without Home Assistant: set a ZIP code or town on the setup page's new Weather & Calendar tab, and the clock, the forecast, weather alerts and the rain map use it, with the weather from Open-Meteo (free, no account). It can set the time zone too. Home Assistant's weather still wins where there is one.
- Calendars from a link: add a Google, iCloud or Outlook calendar by its private iCal address on the same tab. Repeating events, time zones and canceled or moved occurrences are handled. The address is never shown again.
- At night the setup page's Allow prompt is shown at full brightness and takes taps.
Verify this release was built by CI from its own tag:
gh attestation verify echod-arm --repo HuskerMinion/techo5 --source-ref refs/tags/v0.9.18