I run Home Assistant on an RPi4 and have an ESP32-based Core2 with mic (https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-core2-esp32-iot-de...), along with a 16GB 4070 Ti Super in an always-on Windows system I only use for occasional gaming and serving media. I'd love to set up something like you have. Can you recommended a starting place, or ideally, a step-by-step tutorial?

I've never set up any AI system. Would you say setting up such a self-hosted AI is at a point now where an AI novice can get an AI system installed and integrated with an existing Home Assistant install in a couple hours?

I mean - the AI itself will help you get all that setup.

Claude code is your friend.

I run proxmox on an old Dell R710 in my closet that hosts my homeassistant (amongst others) VM and then I've setup my "gaming" PC (which hasn't done any gaming in quite some time) to dual boot (Windows or Deb/Proxmox) and just keep it booted into Deb as another proxmox node. That PC also has a 4070 Super that I have setup to passthru to a VM and on that VM I've got various services utilizing the GPU. This includes some that are utilized by my hetzner bare metal servers for things like image/text embeddings as well as local LLM use (though, rather minimal due to VRAM constraints) and some image/video object detection stuff with my security cameras (slowly working on a remote water gun turret to keep the racoons from trying to eat the kittens that stray cats keep having in my driveway/workshop).

Install claude code (or, opencode, it's also good) - use Opus (get the max plan) and give it a directory that it can use as it's working directory (don't open it in ~/Documents and just start doing things) and prompt it with something as simple as this:

"I have an existing home assistant setup at home and I'd like to determine what sort of self-hosted AI I could setup and integrate with that home assistant install - can you help me get started? Please also maintain some notes in .md files in this working directory with those note files named and organized as you see appropriate so that we can share relevant context and information with future sessions. (example: Hardware information, local urls, network layout, etc) If you're unsure of something, ask me questions. Do not perform any destructive actions without first confirming with me."

Plan mode. _ALWAYS_ use plan mode to get the task setup, if there's something about the plan you don't like, say no and give it notes - it will return with a new plan. Eventually agree to the plan when it's right - then work through that plan not in plan mode, but if it gets off the plan, get back in plan mode to get the/a plan set and then again let it go and just steer it in regular mode.