Turning a voice command into a tool call should be self evidently useful, being able to do that on a small embedded device is the novelty here. In this theoretical example, the thermostat is hosting the model on device and would use no external services.
I confused by the dispatch model. Tool calls typically need some reasonability to be deterministic and, more importantly, predictable in response (o/w GIGO). Why would the thermostat need to interpret a voice command that the node capturing the voice command would not interpret instead?
The node capturing the voice command could be the thermostat. From my understanding they are targeting very small devices.
So that could be a master home automation node, but why not also a single purpose device? I can think of more bad examples than I can good ones, but maybe I am doing some soldering and I need my soldering iron turned up a bit; my hands are full, so doing that by voice would be useful enough. Something I would never link up to a big AI model or home automation network, but could be useful to control by voice.
If it's something that can be burnt directly into a chip and shipped with the products for cheap, maybe that's a more pragmatic way to get AI into small devices (see taalas for a much bigger model doing that, althoug not yet cheap).
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