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Homelab Brief - A Local LLM Voice Assistant in Home Assistant · Big Iron Radio

• 0:03
  Welcome to the HomeLab Brief from Big Iron.
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  Today, wiring a local LLM into Home Assistant
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  as a conversation agent the right way.
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  Quick note, this is an AI voice
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  drawn from a Big Iron guide.
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  Links below.
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  The first counterintuitive move.
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  Don't send everything to the LLM.
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  Home Assistant's built-in assist intent matcher
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  already handles most commands faster
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  and more reliably than any model.
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  Route the LLM, only the fuzzy remainder
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  that fails deterministic matching, not every utterance.
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  The model is your fallback, not your front door.
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  On model size, an 8 billion class model
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  with real function calling training
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  is the practical floor for reliable tool calling.
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  Think LLAMA3, 1-8B Instruct or QN2, 5-7B or 14B.
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  Go smaller and the model narrates instead of acting,
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  it'll tell you it turned on the lights
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  without ever calling the tool.
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  Expose entities deliberately scoped
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  to exactly what you'll voice control.
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  Never expose all.
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  A tight entity list shrinks the context, cuts latency,
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  and closes off a hallucination and prompt injection surface
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  all at once.
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  It's the single highest leverage setting.
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  And keep it safe.
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  Leave locks and security-relevant covers
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  off the LLM's exposed entities entirely.
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  A voice model should not be one hallucinated tool call away
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  from unlocking your front door.
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  One workflow tip.
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  Test from the chat sidebar before you ever touch voice.
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  That isolates the LLM's tool calling accuracy
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  from speech-to-text accuracy,
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  so when something misbehaves you know which have to blame.
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  The full setup's in the show notes.
• 1:53
  That's your brief.