The Open Home Foundation Grows as It Names HACS, Music Assistant, and microWakeWord as Partners
With more than 240 projects under its umbrella, the Open Home Foundation continues to spread its influence.
The Open Home Foundation has grown still wider, as its founders seek to cover growth areas in the home automation sector, with three new "collaboration partners" named — including microWakeWord, a project that provides a resource-efficient wake-word engine for microcontrollers.
"The Open Home Foundation is directly building many technologies, including Home Assistant and ESPHome, that are pivotal for the success of the Open Home," says Open Home Foundation president Paulus Schoutsen in the organization's latest newsletter, brought to our attention by CNX Software.
"A lot of innovation is happening all over the smart home space, and so many projects are building essential technology. Projects like Z-Wave JS, WLED, and Zigbee2MQTT, are deeply interconnected with foundation projects and are critical pieces of a fully realized Open Home. With the Open Home Foundation, we partner with projects to ensure they have the resources to continue to thrive and to make sure they work well within the Open Home."
The Open Home Foundation launched back in April, founded by the team behind Home Assistant — which itself launched a little over a decade ago as a project by Schoutsen to control a smart lighting system from Python, but which has since grown into the most popular open home automation platform around. The Foundation, its founders explain, aims to do for the wider smart home sector what their for-profit firm Nabu Casa did for home automation — and served, at launch, as the umbrella organization for both Home Assistant and more than 240 related projects.
Now, the list of projects found under that umbrella has grown by three: the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS), Joakim Sørensen's project to make it easier to install custom integrations, cards, and themes in Home Assistant; Music Assistant, Marcel van der Veldt's platform for media playback control across local files and remote streaming services; and Kevin Ahrendt's microWakeWord, which allows resource-constrained microcontrollers to perform local wake-word recognition for voice-activated automation assistant systems.
In support of the latter, Schoutsen has called for submissions to the Wake Word Collective project, which allows users to upload recordings of wake words for use in training the model underpinning microWakeWord. "It is important that a voice assistant only listens when a user says the wake word," he explains, "but this is no easy task! To increase the accuracy of microWakeWord, we need recordings from people from all over the world saying wake words, as every language says our current list of wake words slightly differently."
More information is available in the latest Open Home Foundation newsletter, while submissions for the Wake Word Collective dataset can be made on the project's GitHub page.