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OpenHome Abilities

Platform — OpenHome | Voice AI / Smart Speaker
I develop custom abilities for OpenHome, a voice AI and smart speaker platform. Abilities are modular, voice-activated features — essentially apps for a voice assistant — that users can invoke hands-free on OpenHome devices.
The OpenHome team provided me with a free hardware dev kit to build on the platform, as part of their developer program.

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What is OpenHome?

OpenHome is a modern voice AI platform powering smart speakers and voice-first interfaces. It’s designed for extensibility — third-party developers can build and publish abilities that expand what the assistant can do.

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Building for voice

Developing for a voice-first platform is a distinct design challenge — there’s no screen, no mouse, no keyboard. Everything has to work through natural spoken language:

Conversational design

Crafting interaction flows that feel natural in speech, with clear prompts and graceful error handling.

Intent handling

Mapping spoken phrases to structured intents and extracting parameters from natural language.

External integrations

Connecting voice triggers to APIs and services for real-world actions.

Hardware-first testing

Testing on the actual OpenHome dev kit, not just a simulator, to validate the real speaker experience.

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Why voice AI

Voice interfaces are one of the most underexplored frontiers in developer tooling. As AI assistants become more capable, the ability to build reliable, expressive voice-first experiences is increasingly valuable — and OpenHome is one of the most developer-friendly platforms to build on.