I want to use Lemmy more but the content just isn’t enough yet especially on niche topics and hobbies. I do try to come here for the “front page” over Reddit, since those posts on Reddit get so many replies you ain’t reading them all anyways.

But when it’s time to talk World of Warcraft, for example, Lemmy is mostly dead.

They have been working on the dashboards a fair amount recently but if you’re expecting a brand new look, that isn’t likely to happen. They recently hired the guy behind “bubble cards”, who has then put a lot of work into the stock UI’s tile card. It’s pretty obvious this is the direction they intend to continue.

However it’s very extendable with themes and there is even some project that uses some entire closed source frontend for their dashboards. I forget the name of it though, but it might be worth looking into for you.

I’ve also been using Speech-to-Phrase, which has a limited number of supported phrases BUT works much faster than the 4s, so it’s a good tailback when the primary methods aren’t working.

To answer your question, yes.

However, I’ve found that unless you’re going to host your own AI engine with a GPU, you’re stuck with OpenAI or Google Gemini. Luckily I’ve been able to use both with just the free tier.

Whisper and Piper run locally although Piper is a little slow on the green for my tastes. 4 second responses work, but are also frustrating when you’re not sure if it heard you or not. You’re also stuck with just the built in intents (phrases) so you need to be specific in how you say stuff.

Ultimately I set up a cloud based and a local based voice workflow and then I setup a ping probe to a IPs. If I detect the internet is up, it uses the cloud workflow. If the internet is down, it swaps to local to keep the house voice controlled.

Can also try the built in section headers now. You have to start a new dashboard to enable them or convert an existing one.

This is how I started too.

I just wanted something to monitor and track solar usage. Next thing I know, my whole house is monitored and automated.