188
Amazon is bricking primary feature on $160 Echo device after 1 year
(arstechnica.com)
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
Even with home assistant set up, I still have Google assistant handling the voice control aspect. I might be wrong but I don't think home assistant comes with any voice controls. You still need something else if you want to control it with voice.
Edit: it looks like there is something built into HA called Assist. I tried it a bit and while the basics work, I find it harder to use than google assistant.
Getting Home Assistant to play nicely with Google without using their Nabu Casa service definitely is a hurdle, but once you get over it, it's super nice. I ended up just blocking Google DNS inside my network to force all the Google home devices to use my internal DNS to fix the https/hairpin NAT issue. It wasn't a big deal since my kids are getting older and I needed to block outbound DNS in general since they're getting savvy enough to get around my content filtering.
Oh I just paid for Nabu Casa. It's only $65 USD / yr and it supports the dev of HA. I'm happy to pay for it for how much I get out of HA.