Voice assistants are difficult, both electro-acoustically to get a good clean voice signal from the ambient room noise and voice-assistant generated audio (this

Voice assistants are difficult, both electro-acoustically to get a good clean voice signal from the ambient room noise and voice-assistant generated audio (this is called barge-in), as well as the software to actually parse that speech. A great open-source voice-assistant is ambitious. But why isn't there a great open-source version of any $iot_appliance? IOT, in general, is crawling with companies that are looking for a monthly cash flow, and are therefore creating an ecosystem of non-federated, walled garden type devices that report back to some central server to keep the user dependent upon and paying monthly cash to some company. All of these IOT projects are generally simpler than voice-assistants, and I look forward to the day when we have IOT projects that talk to each other or a local server, without linking us to some company forever.