4 ms·
In 2025, can't believe there's still no open-source alternative to these devices.
by mrlinx 1y ago
In 2025, can't believe there's still no open-source alternative to these devices.
- victorbjorklund 1y agoNot exactly the same but there is Home assistant voice.
- zahlman 1y agoIt's still honestly amazing to me that people buy, or want, devices like this, even before considering the downsides. I mean, I don't even like leaving voicemail messages. So the idea of talking to nobody in particular, within my own home, to cause something to happen, totally freaks me out. I really don't need more excuses for physical laziness, either.
- verytrivial 1y agoThey're hardware projections into your living space of a massive system run by Amazon. It's the massive system that open-source will have trouble replicating.
- mrlinx 1y agoSpotify multi-speaker playing + a LLM answering questions would cover what 80% of people need.
- herculity275 1y agoMost people use Echos as voice controlled music players with occasional smart assistant functionality, this shouldn't be too hard to replicate in OSS. You could argue that the extend to which they're not making you buy into the Amazon ecosystem is a major failure of the product line.
- danilopopeye 1y agoI’ve been meaning to try the Home Assistant new voice control[1] for a while. Do you consider it open-source enough? :) 1. https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/ https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/
- NoboruWataya 1y agoThe most serious project I knew in this space was Mycroft, but I just looked it up and they ceased development due to a patent troll.
- general1465 1y agoWhat would be the use case?
- IAmBroom 1y agoThe same as Amazon's devices. Odd question.
- general1465 1y agoTo buy stuff from Amazon? You don't need open source firmware for that.
- wiml 1y agoI know a few people with Echos and I don't think I've ever observed them being used to order stuff. Music, answering trivia questions, timers/appointments, sure. This is anecdata of course but still. (I didn't count music as buying stuff since it's a flat rate streaming service.)
- toast0 1y agoVoice activated timers / clocks and unit conversions are handy in the kitchen.
- johnisgood 1y agoIs it worth it over the manual methods?
- toast0 1y agoI removed my Google Home; IMHO, it got worse at processing voice commands over time, and I didn't use it that much. However, when it was working well, it was nice to be able to set a timer handsfree when my hands were busy. And when running a recipie where the measurements are inconvenient, I apprechiated being able to access unit conversions without context switching to a computing device (memorizing unit conversions could fill that gap). I'm not in a rush to replace the device, but if I hear about a device that can do those things in an offline way, I might consider it. None of the online features were useful or reliable enough, and by their nature they would be changing all the time ... having them was a negative. False positive wakeword triggering was annoying too. But maybe a talking timer would have a wakeword that was more specific.