Leaks were saying it's a Friend competitor https://friend.com

Just a chatbot in a box.

The market is ripe for ChatGPT in a box, replacing google home or Alexa desktop pucks. God knows the google home assistant has been detuned and detuned to the point it barely works for turning the lights on and off at this point. There's a handful of golf-ball shaped objects on AliExpress for $25 that provide this functionality, powered by an ESP32 IoT chip, but doesn't have wakeword capability (yet). I picked up two for a Home Assistant voice assistant project but haven't had time to dive into it yet.

I don't see it, I think people are burnt out and trained not to expect anything more than weather and Spotify from their "smart speakers"

You yourself have not felt the need to hook an LLM up, and you already have the hardware! :p

Oh but I have! And it is brilliant.

I've got codex-cli with speech-to-text hooked up to (among other things) Home Assistant via MCP.

It'll do anything. I can literally tell it to play some music from a playlist and make the lights flash to the beat, and it'll just figure out how to do that.

Is it fast? Not really. Is it annoyingly slow for quick tasks like turning the lights off? Not too annoying anyway. Turning the lights on/off takes about 4 seconds from when I finish speaking.

Because Apple won’t give you access to what you need as a dev for this kind of thing on iPhone: always-on audio listening to multiple streams : ambient sound, my voice, whatever is playing in my headphones … think an AI assistant listens to audiobooks together with you and allows you to ask questions / lookup things etc …