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Year of the Voice - Chapter 5
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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homeassistant
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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See, the problem is I've always said that I'd replace Alexa when I had a meaningful alternative and this is doing all I need it to now. So now I actually have to follow through, and that feel like effort.
Ugh, I KNOW. All these people developing these amazing alternatives and I have to checks notes make an effort to degoogle myself for my own good. SIGH.
I left Alexa behind for HomePod and I’m happy no more By the way… and home integration really makes everything work together. But an open source voice assistant would be really nice.
Curious, what is it about HomePod that makes it better than Alexa? I use google, not Alexa, so I have no frame of reference.
Mostly how terrible Amazon is when it comes to pumping ads at you. Alexa has the terrible habit of finishing some answers with “…by the way, did you know you can order straight from Amazon by saying buy more tape, try it now” or some incredibly annoying things like that. HomePod doesn’t do that. It also works with my phone seamlessly since I have an iPhone, transferring music from phone to the HomePod with just a tap is fun. The HomeKit part is more restrictive but I have a Pi Zero v1 with HomeBridge installed and all my smart WiFi devices are now HomeKit compatible.
Google will sometimes do the same but along the lines of “by the way, you can ask what else Google home can do”.
I bought an atom echo but haven’t set it up yet. Just want to set it up to use Janet as a wake word.
One of the tricks I read is to put the echo in kids mode and it won’t throw ads at your face but you’ll lose some functions.