DeepSeek’s new R1 model is gaining popularity for its power and capability, making it perfect for Home Assistant Assist or Home Assistant Voice integrations. With advanced reasoning skills, it offers lifelike chat interactions and excels in home control. This guide will help you set up a DeepSeek R1 integration in your Home Assistant, and it’s free!
We will use Sage from Homeway.io, which powers Home Assistant’s Assist and Voice features with AI services. It offers conversational chat powered by DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, along with free speech-to-text and text-to-speech, featuring over 50 lifelike voices from OpenAI, Azure, AWS, and Google.
Even better, Sage can provide information about your home state, control connected devices, perform web searches, check live weather, and look up sports scores. Sage includes a memory feature that can remember your customization requests!
Homeway is committed to your privacy, and Sage is no exception. Sage is built in the most privacy forward way possible. We send a minimal amount of anonymized data to each AI provider and immediately delete the data when the processing is done. See our privacy policy for complete details. Homeway is 100% community-supported, so if you want to help, consider becoming a supporter!
Install the Homeway Sage Add-on With DeepSeek
Installing the Homeway add-on for Home Assistant takes about 20 seconds and requires no technical knowledge. If you can access your Home Assistant dashboard, you can install the add-on.
Add The Sage Integration In Home Assistant
Once Homeway is installed and connected to your account, Home Assistant will discover Sage’s Wyoming integration. To enable it:
- Open Home Assistant in your web browser.
- Go to the Home Assistant settings.
- Select “Devices & services”
- Find the box in “Discovered” for Homeway Sage.
- Click the “ADD” button.
If you don’t have a Wyoming box in your Discovered section, follow this guide to set up the integration manually.
Create the Sage AI Voice Assistant
Now that the Homeway Assistant integration is ready, head to the Home Assistant Voice Assistant settings to configure it.
- Open Home Assistant in your web browser.
- Go to the Home Assistant settings.
- Select “Voice assistants”
- Click the “+ ADD ASSISTANT” button.
- For “Configuration”
- Name – Anything you want it to be, we suggest “Homeway” or “Sage.”
- Set your preferred language.
- For “Conversation agent”
- Select “Homeway Sage”
- Be sure to enable “Prefer handling commands locally.” This will allow the built-in Home Assistant model to handle actions relating to your smart home devices and pass everything else off to Sage.
- For “Speech-to-text”
- Select “Homeway Sage”
- Set the language you want to speak in.
- For “Text-to-speech”
- Select “Homeway Sage”
- Set the language you want to speak in. Most voices support multiple languages and can even switch in real time!
- Select a speaker voice.
- Homeway Sage offers over 25 voice models from OpenAI, Google, Azure, and more. Try different voices to see which you like best!
- When you’re done, select “CREATE” at the bottom to make the new assistant profile.
- When the profile pop-up closes, locate the assistant profile you created, click the three verticle dot menu, and then select “Set as preferred.”
You did it! You now have a free, powerful, intelligent OpenAI ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet assistant!
Setup Your Home Assistant Voice
If you have a Home Assistant Voice (the standalone “Alexa-like device”), make sure it’s configured to use your Homeway Sage assistant profile. To do so, look in your Home Assistant devices list for “Home Assistant Voice” and click it to see its settings. In the “configuration” box, ensure that “Assistant” is set to your Homeway Sage profile.
Select DeekSeek R1 As Your Chat Provider
Finally, go to the Sage settings and select DeepSeek R1 as the chat provider. That’s it! You now have a fully power Home Assistant Assist with DeepSeek R1. 👏
Join The Community
Homeway is a Home Assistant community project with the goal of providing cloud tools for the Home Assistant community. This includes Sage, but there is also so much more: remote access, Alexa and Google Assistant support, local access to LAN services, and that’s just the start!
Be sure to join our Discord community to join the fun!
