Athom discontinues further development of its own Homey speech recognition

Athom has announced that it is discontinuing further development of its own speech recognition service for the Homey smart home hub. Instead, the company opts for the more advanced services of Google and Amazon.

The company from Enschede writes that the decision was ’emotionally difficult, but rationally simple’. In the blog post, it mentions that speech recognition has been a stumbling block and has always been an experimental feature. Athom concludes that building a well-functioning speech to text service for a start-up is impossible and that large tech companies such as Google and Amazon have now built products that perform better. That is why Athom now uses the services of those companies for its speech recognition.

From version 2.0 of the Homey firmware, new users can only talk directly to the device if they manually switch on this function. At the beginning of this year, Athom came up with his second skill for Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa, which lets users control devices in the house directly. The company says in its current announcement that Google Assistant integration will follow shortly.

Athom is also changing its Homey Music service. The company says it was intended to play music from different sources on different speakers, but it never worked properly. Many people didn’t use the function to combine different playlists and preferred to play music from one source, such as a service like Spotify, automatically on a speaker. The company was also not given access to the various streaming services.

That is why from version 2.0 there is no longer support for those services, but it is only possible to manage playback via the Homey app. Searching for songs and managing playlists will no longer be possible within it, although users can still automate the playback of songs and playlists, for example, via a Flow. The other functions are performed via the apps of the various streaming services.