I have my home assistant server tugged away in a server rack. Is it possible to still use Almond by setting up a microphone and Pi somewhere else in the house and communicate with HA through MQTT or through other means/protocols?
Along the same line, can I set up multiple voice assistants around the house and somehow detect/decide which one should process my command?
You can set up Almond standalone using the almond-server docker images or installing from its git repository. You can then tell Home Assistant to talk to Almond by setting the Almond integration, which will also teach Almond to talk to Home Assistant. It should all work provided that Almond has an IP address that Home Assistant can talk to.
As for multiple speakers, it’s something many users have requested, and we might have something for it in the future - especially to support less performant HW - but for now, multiple instances of Almond are independent of each other.
This is great to hear, thanks @gcampax!
Now when I do set up multiple independent instances of Almond, can I connect all of them to the same home assistant instance? In other words can I set up multiple Almond integrations (or one that can connect to multiple almond servers)?
Exciting to hear that a true satellite setup might be possible in the future!
That’s a good question. I think Home Assistant only supports connecting to one Almond at a time? I’m not sure about that because I haven’t tried it yet.
Sounds like I should experiment with this 
Since you can have more than one Home Assistant installation connected to each other, one option could be to run a small scale home assistant on each satellite. While overkill, it might be a workaround in case only one Almond integration is possible.
Did you make any progress on this topic?
Well, the latest Genie 1.0 release now supports satellites. This version will be available as home assistant add-on within the next few days / weeks as per this PR: Update to the latest Almond/Genie release by gcampax · Pull Request #2329 · home-assistant/addons · GitHub
So how do setting up Genie satellites work? I’d love to be able to get a Pi Zero 2W for each room in my house, hook it up to a speaker and microphone with a pre-built image burned to to the SDcard. Is there much more to it than that? I already have Home Assistant with the Genie add-on installed…