You can use your phone to text or talk to HA's assistant. I've done that a number of times when Alexa fails. Having dedicated hardware is a huge step up for me. I've tried their ESP32 mini cube assistant thing before and it showed a lot of promise but the hardware (speaker and mic, processor was fine) was lacking. This seems to be a good mic and speaker wrapped around a similar core so I'm super excited for it.

The voice input can really be done however you like, the benefit of a device like the Voice PE is the wake word detection on-device.

I have an office-style desk-phone (SNOM) connected to a SIP server and I can pick the receiver up and talk to the Assistant, but you can plug in any way you like to get the audio to/from HA.

With your phone, wake words are usually locked down by Apple/Google so you can't really have it hands-free, and that's the problem this device is solving; not the audio input itself, but the wake-word/handfree input.

On an Android phone, you can replace the Google Assistant with the Home Assistant one, but you still have to activate it the usual way, press a button or launch the app etc.

With existing phones and laptops, there’s either activation friction (pressing the “listen to me” button) or the device has to be always listening, which requires a lot of trust in your hardware vendors.

With an open source and potentially local-only device, you can have your voice assistant and keep your privacy.

last i checked open source whisper does not support streaming or diarization out of the box. you really need both for a good voice assistant experience