When coming from sauna the other day, I checked my phone. I received a message on SimpleX from my Home Assistant saying:
Dog is barking persistently, please check if everything’s okay.
OK, I don’t have a dog, but that’s the least interesting part of this strange message.
After some detective work, I discovered what actually happened. My kid had triggered the wake word (“OK Nabu”) twice (on purpose), but then stayed silent, leaving the system listening to ambient household noises. The Whisper transcription model, trying to make sense of the random sounds, interpreted them as “dog is barking” – twice. But here’s where it gets interesting: rather than simply responding with confusion or an error, the Qwen 3.5 model running through Venice API analyzed the situation. It’s prompt says that it is taking care of my home through my Home Assistant. It also saw its available tools, found my custom SimpleX messaging integration, and made an executive decision: if there’s a dog barking persistently, the responsible thing to do is alert the homeowner. The AI essentially thought, “This seems like a potential security or welfare concern – better notify the human.”
This incident beautifully illustrates both the impressive reasoning capabilities and the amusing limitations of current AI systems. My setup runs through a chain of services: wake word detection on an ESP32-S3 device – Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, audio streaming to Home Assistant, transcription via Wyoming-Whisper, LLM processing through Venice API’s Qwen3 235B model, converting the response to speech through wyoming-piper and finally my custom SimpleX messaging tool for notifications (but I don’t have any notifications set up, the user can just say “message to my phone”).
The fact that the AI could make what it considered a logical decision – even if based on a complete misinterpretation – is mind blowing to me. It shows we’re entering an era where AI assistants aren’t just following commands but actively trying to be helpful in unexpected ways. And we’re going to see some weird stuff along the way.
This is one of the reasons I am interested in AI a lot these days – the world is changing (as it was/is with Bitcoin) and I want to have the front seat.