Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

Maybe 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://homebridge.io

I was wondering the same thing yesterday. It sure would be nice to have something that worked completely on-prem. Would be cool if it could run on something power efficient like an old smartphone. Then you could N old devices, install your app add to wifi, duct tape them to the wall near a power outlet.

Would probably be easier with Android as I imagine you could push apk files OTA if you wanted, which would come in handy.

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 don't have an answer to your question, but have you considered scrapping voice control altogether and instead using motion detectors or other rules to govern whether the lights are on?

clap on

clap off

the clapper

clap clap