As Snowden told us, video and audio recording capabilities of your devices are NSA spying vectors. OSS/Linux is a safeguard against such capabilities. The massive datacenter investments in US will be used to classify us all into a patriotic (for Israel)/Oligarchist social credit score, and every mega tech company can increase profits through NSA cooperation, and are legally obligated to cooperate with all government orders.
Speech to text and speech automation are useful tech, though always listening state sponsored terrorists is a non-NSA targeted path for sweeping future social credit classifications of your past life.
Some small LLMs that can be used for speech to text: https://modal.com/blog/open-source-stt
It’s not lack of software, it’s lack of hardware. Home assistant is ready as are others, but there’s no good cheap mic/speaker/esp in a box hardware
No, home assistant very much is not ready to replace an Alexa device. Home assistant mainly only does automation of smart devices, and as far as i can see from their website it does nothing else. One of the main things people use Alexa for is to play music from services like Spotify, and home assistant doesn’t appear to do that.
Sorry… my experience has been trying to move my google home to something open with no cloud… it’s not been perfect for me after moving. Definitely things missing, but lots of things are better. Spotify does work with home assistant… maybe look again or send a pr