jxlarrea/kiosk-satellite

Kiosk Satellite turns an old Android tablet mounted on a wall into a voice controlled screen for Home Assistant, the popular smart home platform. Instead of just showing a dashboard, it becomes an always on assistant that listens for a wake word even when the screen is off or another app is running in front of it. Setup is a five step wizard that connects to your Home Assistant server, picks which dashboard to show, and asks Android for only the permissions the choices you made actually need. It pairs closely with a companion project called Voice Satellite, which normally runs inside a browser tab and can only listen for its wake word while that tab is visible and awake. Kiosk Satellite removes that limit by running the same wake word detection natively on the tablet instead of in a browser, which the README says runs many times faster and uses far less battery and processing power, efficient enough to work smoothly even on older, low powered tablets. Beyond voice, the app includes a long list of kiosk features aimed at wall mounted tablets: a lockdown mode with a PIN protected exit, blocked buttons, several kinds of screensavers including a full photo frame mode, remote administration through a small web page you can open from any browser on the network, automatic rotation between different dashboard views, and support for showing photos, video or a live camera feed sent from Home Assistant automations. It can also act as a synchronized speaker for a music system called Sendspin and expose itself as a set of sensors over MQTT, so things like screen brightness or battery level show up automatically inside Home Assistant with no manual configuration file needed. The app is distributed as a free Android APK you download and install directly rather than through the Play Store, and Home Assistant itself does not need to use a secure connection for the microphone features to work, since the app handles that internally.