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
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
It isn’t listed anywhere on their homepage or example demos or anywhere listing its capabilities, so i did a web search to find it and I found that it sorta just kinda can do Spotify, but (1.) that isn’t listed anywhere on the home assistant abilities listing pages, which shows just how not ready for the mass market it is, and (2.) takes a ridiculous amount of very techie setup just to get it to work
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/spotify/
And also, out of the box can i ask it to:
tell me the weather?
set a timer?
set an alarm?
I don’t see anything on the website that says it can do these things. And even if it can (which doesn’t appear to be the case from their website) then the fact that the website doesn’t say it can do these things is a problem in itself that shows it isn’t ready for the mass market
Just look at the webpage for Alexa vs. Home Assistant and it’s clear that Alexa has a very wide variety of abilities and is designed to be easy to use by anyone, while the home assistant website only shows it doing smart device automation and looks like it’s not for regular folks
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCCNHWV5
https://www.home-assistant.io/
I would LOVE to replace my Alexa devices with a local FOSS system, but unfortunately home assistant isn’t close to being able to do that yet