How these ESP32-systems work is that you send a wake word to the device itself. It can detect the word without an internet connection, the device itself underst

How these ESP32-systems work is that you send a wake word to the device itself. It can detect the word without an internet connection, the device itself understands it and wakes up. After the device is woken up, it sends your speech to home assistant, which either - handles it locally, if you have fast enough computer - sends it to home assistant cloud, if you set it up - sends it to chatgpt, claude sonnet etc. if you set it up I'm planning on building a proxmox rack server next year, so I'm probably going to just handle all the discussions locally. The home assistant cloud is quite private too, at least that's what they say (and they're in EU, so I think there might be truth in what they say)...