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:
- It’s Amazon
- 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.
Patent pending. Are you sure this isn’t an open source SaaS which can’t work without commercial products
I think that’s just for the hardware components. Their software is Apache licensed.
yes, lots of plugins work without commercial products. The voice recognition based on DeepSpeech is shit though.