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.
There is Mycroft.ai which can do homeassistant skills but its still centralised as the processing power required for Stt and context processing is still very expensive.
offline functionality: https://community.mycroft.ai/t/easiest-way-to-use-mycroft-completely-offline/3741
https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-core/issues/2615
I proposed it before and deleted it because I thought that their home server was non-free.
It seems that their home server is just Selene-backend as pointed in that issue.
You can change servers too to a local instance of this.
Patent pending. Are you sure this isn’t an open source SaaS which can’t work without commercial products
Patent pending
I think that’s just for the hardware components. Their software is Apache licensed.
Are you sure this isn’t an open source SaaS which can’t work without commercial products
yes, lots of plugins work without commercial products. The voice recognition based on DeepSpeech is shit though.
rhasspy combined with something like home assistant or node red
Home assistant isn’t much better than Alexa, it doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of OSS tools to go with it.
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
