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.

  • Helix 🧬@feddit.deB
    1·
    3 years ago

    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.