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I have never had an Alexa but surely there isn't that much time saved by having it turn off lights. Siri on your iPhone can set alarms and shopping lists and presumably your phone it always around you.
I’m also very interested in an answer. We use Alexa a lot, but this week I had to unplug every Alexa in the house because a distant family member had gained access to the family Amazon account and was trying to use the “drop in” feature to listen to our conversations. In the course of our investigation I found out that Alexa does not log privacy related events at all (there is no record of a drop in stored anywhere),…
For what it's worth, Google Homes don't have this drop-in feature. You can make calls and make announcements, but both require the person on the other end to actively answer or respond.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a terrible suggestion. "Taking Apple's word on it" is not a valid privacy strategy. Companies have shown time and again that they lie about what is happening behind the scenes, or even just change their policies for the worst. Then there are rogue employees, such as the Ubiquiti fiasco, and secret government data collection, such as PRISM, of which Apple was a participant. Apple has broken trust multiple time…
> "Taking Apple's word on it" is not a valid privacy strategy. I respectfully disagree. If Apple says "we don't do X", and then is shown to do X, that would be a massive PR disaster. Whereas Amazon makes no privacy promises at all. In fact, they promise the opposite.
First off, unless you want to really DIY the glue-code, you want to use HomeAssistant (huge community) or NodeRED.
The only part I'm uncertain about and haven't explored properly myself is the voice-to-text part. Any solution should be pluggable into HA or NR.
Relevant threads in HA voice-assistant sub-forum:
* https://community.home-assistant.io/t/replacing-alexa-or-goo... (Ada, Rhasspy and other FOSS alternatives)
* https://community.home-assistant.io/t/local-voice-control/29... (you can apparently use Alexa for voice control even if it does not have any internet access)
* https://community.home-assistant.io/t/best-option-for-local-... (local TTS)
I’m also very interested in an answer. We use Alexa a lot, but this week I had to unplug every Alexa in the house because a distant family member had gained access to the family Amazon account and was trying to use the “drop in” feature to listen to our conversations. In the course of our investigation I found out that Alexa does not log privacy related events at all (there is no record of a drop in stored anywhere),…
clap on clap off the clapper clap clap
I've heard of Mycroft before but have no personal experience with it: https://mycroft.ai It seems like they have an open source client that you can run on your own hardware but it's still dependent on the backend services that Mycroft-the-company provides. Perhaps their privacy stance is more palatable to you, though? I think there used to be a project that was fully on-device but it got bought and consumed by Sonos
I've heard of Mycroft before but have no personal experience with it: https://mycroft.ai It seems like they have an open source client that you can run on your own hardware but it's still dependent on the backend services that Mycroft-the-company provides. Perhaps their privacy stance is more palatable to you, though? I think there used to be a project that was fully on-device but it got bought and consumed by Sonos
* changing the wake word was a pain
* having a Home account is essentially mandatory (kind of defeating the point)
* speech synthesis was really bad
* It needed a lot of rhetorical help to get useful responses.
Just getting to that point involved several hours of fairly hardcore debugging and even then basic issues like reliable mic input still existed.
I also couldn't find reasonably priced (<$100) speakers/mics in an Alexa form factor, but it wouldn't be fair to blame that on the mycroft team.