Snips and Home Assistant: on-device voice commands at home (opens in new tab)

Good idea! We haven't looked into this yet, although we are preparing iOS and Android versions of Snips which run entirely on the phone.

Yes, as per my comment to badlogic, we are about to publish an in-depth guide for microphone solutions. So far, the ReSpeaker ($79, https://www.seeedstudio.com/ReSpeaker-Mic-Array-Far-field-w%...) seems to be the most promising, but the Micro Semi and MiniDSP are also good. The Matrix Creator has a lot of potential, but requires quite some tweaking to get good performance. We are eagerly waiting for their Matrix Voice to ship. We'll post our findings next week on https://labs.snips.ai.

Hey Mario, OP here. Indeed, DIY guides are badly lacking in this domain. We are preparing a thorough benchmark of existing microphone array solutions. It will feature the ReSpeaker, Conexant, Matrix Creator, MicroSemi and MiniDSP which are all built for 360-degrees far-field audio capture. The goal is to have an excellent, affordable, and replicable hardware setup on par with Alexa and Google. Stay tuned!

Thanks echion!