Satellite1 vs Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition
FutureProofHomes Satellite1.1 and the official HA Voice Preview Edition both promise private, local voice control - here is how they actually differ.
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Local voice control finally has real hardware. The two devices people actually cross-shop are the official Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition and the community-favorite FutureProofHomes Satellite1.1. Both run your commands through Home Assistant’s Assist pipeline on your own network instead of a big-tech cloud. I run both of them. They differ in ambition. If you have not stood up a local voice pipeline yet, how to add voice control without Amazon or Google covers the software side first.
The short answer
For a first local voice endpoint with the least friction, the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition is the official, supported starting point. For the best far-field pickup and bigger audio ambitions, the Satellite1.1 is the more capable hardware, with more enthusiast energy behind it and frequent backorders.
Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition
The Voice Preview Edition is Nabu Casa’s own answer to “give me an Echo that does not phone home.” It is purpose-built for Assist: wake word, local processing, native integration - plug it in and your Home Assistant instance is the assistant. Routine commands never leave the house.
It is voice-first hardware with an evolving voice UX; it is not a touchscreen dashboard, and the best experience can involve tuning the local models to your hardware. As the official device, it is also the one that tracks Assist’s development most closely.
FutureProofHomes Satellite1.1
The Satellite1.1 is the enthusiast build taken seriously: an ESP32-S3 paired with a 16-core XMOS XU316 DSP, which is the piece that matters - it gives the Satellite1 excellent far-field voice capture, including while music is playing. It runs ESPHome and the Assist pipeline entirely on your LAN with no cloud dependency, adds built-in Snapcast multiroom audio, and offers an optional mmWave presence add-on.
The caveats: it costs around $135, it is Wi-Fi only (no Thread or Matter), and it is frequently on backorder - demand keeps outrunning supply.
How to choose
| Voice Preview Edition | Satellite1.1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Who makes it | Nabu Casa (official) | FutureProofHomes (community hardware) |
| Pipeline | Assist, native | Assist via ESPHome, fully local |
| Far-field capture | Good | Excellent (XMOS DSP), even during playback |
| Extras | Official support, tracks Assist development | Snapcast multiroom, optional mmWave add-on |
| Availability | Generally available | Frequently backordered |
Neither is your only option. A reflashed Echo Show 8 running LineageOS gets you a screen and a microphone together for the price of a used gadget. And whichever hardware you land on, the speech models behind Assist are the other half of the setup - see Whisper and Piper.