Does it need to be voice? You can get physical switches that work with “smart” lighting systems, and physical kitchen timers have been around long enough that they are big-free and have a well-tested UX.
Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?
51–60 of 166 posts
Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?
#52Something like Mycroft or Almond(if i recall correctly)
Lot of plugins and functionality, especially mycroft.However Almond being open-source is very good for hacking around
Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?
#53Earlier 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.
You're right, it was: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...
Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?
#54Maybe this is an obvious answer, and therefore not one you're interested in, but there's Siri. Although audio is sent to the cloud, you can choose whether it is stored or not, and whatever you pick, Apple's privacy policy is very strict. HomePods are mostly advertised as music playback devices, but I mostly use mine as a HomeKit control device. Homebridge allows you to control non-HomeKit devices via Siri: https://ho…
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…
"The CSAM fiasco" was just geeks on the internet being geeks on the internet. And some really bad marketing on Apple's part.
The feature itself was perfectly fine, very few people even bothered to read up on it and focused on "OMG APPLE IS SCANNING MY PHOTOS!" without any nuance.
Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?
#55Maybe this is an obvious answer, and therefore not one you're interested in, but there's Siri. Although audio is sent to the cloud, you can choose whether it is stored or not, and whatever you pick, Apple's privacy policy is very strict. HomePods are mostly advertised as music playback devices, but I mostly use mine as a HomeKit control device. Homebridge allows you to control non-HomeKit devices via Siri: https://ho…
> you can choose whether it is stored or not You choose to tell them to store it or not. Due to third party doctrine you have very little legal protection for material you voluntarily provide to a third party. Even if apple behaves honestly and has no vulnerabilities or compromises they may be forced to hand the data over. And the fact that you don't know this says to me that Apple is in practice unethically exaggera…
The third party doctrine has changed though, since US v. Warshak and Carpenter v. US, right?
Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?
#56It's unfortunate that another comment that links to Rhasspy has been downvoted (I assume because it lacked any other context) so I wanted to mention the project with some additional context: https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/ While I've not used the entire Rhasspy project myself (but trying it out is on the long list of things to do :) ) I have used the offline Text-To-Speech sub-project Larynx... ...and it is amazing !…
Software has been mostly solved for a while. My issue is hardware. The way I read, is that to get proper voice recognition in many circumstances, you need a microphone array (for every DIY Alexa and Dot). Now you have a PI, the array installed on it and… it just stands around looking ugly and accumulating dust?
You want a case, but then from my research, cases can easily interfere with those arrays. So you need one that’s custom-made for the array you are getting. But no array I’ve seen does actually come with such a case.
Back when I asked (relevant subreddits and on tildes before I deleted my account), no one could tell me that any of my research had been wrong, but no one had a solution either. I posted the threads almost 2 years ago, so maybe things changed? I’m currently still using Alexa, but besides privacy reasons I’d also love custom software that can take the idiocy out of my assistant (mainly by using pre-configured commands that do what I want instead of sometimes guessing what I want; also for on-the-fly language switching, Alexa is atrocious when you want to request a band that’s not in your primary language)
I could probably get away with the kitchen and office assistant using a normal microphone, but both bedroom and living room need to recognize voices from most directions (and in the case of the living room, also have decent recognition through music playing).
If anyone has any solutions, I’d love to hear them.
Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?
#57It going to be fun with public transport
Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
That deserves its own post. This reminds me of when Samsung sent the press release that people shouldn’t discuss personal things near their television, because an unpatchable product of their allowed anyone who knew how to tap into the tv mics…
It was truly a bizarre experience. First we noticed a random intermittent ringing noise in the house and couldn’t figure out what it was. We tracked it down to the Alexa but since there are no logs or notifications we didn’t know what had just happened. It seems the person hung up when they heard us looking around so we never saw any visible indication that anything was happening. Once we figured it out, we then had…
Honestly, I find it amazing that so many people let these things into their homes. The price you pay for such little actual utility isn't worth it. I won't use voice recognition on a single device. Not only do I not trust Google/Amazon, I don't trust that I wouldn't accidentally say something that triggers it to phone a person I'm talking about, or order something expensive in the internet. Home Assistant on my phone and lots of physical zigbee controllers works just fine for me. I don't want to talk to my devices.
I have an in-law who uses voice recognition to dictate messages into WhatsApp extended family group and some of the shit she's posted is hilariously (unintentionally) spicy. Her kids get into stupid "conversations" with Alexa. They're 8. Just no.
Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?
#59We used to call that thing a wife but we are living in the future now. In the future we need AI to take care of important tasks such as toggling lights and shopping reminders.
Re: Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?
#60I have set up a Rhasspy instance on a Pi 3A (using a Seedstudio microphone HAT) and it works decently, although it is by no means Siri/Alexa grade.
The good thing about it is that it takes only a couple of minutes to install via Docker and has all the base niceties out of the box (trigger word, intent detection, speech synthesis).
I would say it is good enough to tinker with, although clearly not yet up to par (mind you, I am also trying it in English).