I use snips regularly, set it up for music and lighting control just like you haha. I really enjoy how easy it was to setup - have a ton of Pis sitting and gadgets sitting around. Are you looking to get their maker kit? Or use your own setup?

I plan on using my own setup, I'm might get there eventually when I actually buy a Philips Hue set...Do you have any good tutorial? I saw the two on Snips' medium blog but I am not sure if there is anything else out there?

It depends on how much DIY you want to do. Snips.ai is the easiest to set up and can be installed from the Hass.io dashboard.

There is also Rhasspy[1], a voice assistant toolkit for Home Assitsant. It has instructions and custom components on how to integrate a full voice assistant (wake up, speech to text, intent recognition, text to speech) into Home Assistant using solely open source tools with different choices per category. It's very cool.

[1]: https://github.com/synesthesiam/rhasspy-assistant

Snips is very good imo, especially if you need only these features

I've been interested for a long time in an AI assistant but bringing one of big tech's spying devices into my home has always been a total non starter. So for me personally, Snips is an extremely promising project. The team is very responsive in their Telegram as well (https://t.me/snipsair).