Someone in my family uses Alexa to do things like control lights and some other electrical appliances in the home. I don’t know anything about this smart home trend, but I immediately disliked Alexa because:

  1. It’s Amazon
  2. When the internet went down, we were unable to use Alexa to any affect to control the appliances. I am guessing this means that all communication (unsurprisingly) is routed to a central Amazon server before going to the appliances, which IMO is a pretty terrible design choice for the consumer (but I am guessing not for Amazon).

Are there any open source alternatives to things like this? I can see it being useful in some scenarios or at the very least it would be a nice gimmick to have if you have a spare rpi lying around.

  • @peppermint@lemmy.ml
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    03 years ago

    Home assistant isn’t much better than Alexa, it doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of OSS tools to go with it.

    • @wintermute@feddit.de
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      3 years ago

      i don’t get your point, rhasspy is for wakeword detection, speech to text etc.
      for automation you can use HA / node red, both of which are working well together with rhasspy