Definitely not a complete FOSS setup but I decided to go the Apple route a self-hosted Homebridge for non Apple home-kit enabled devices.
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Great, they made it public.
If Corporations were people, they'd be disappeared in the night for stuff like this.
Which is why they're not people.
Why anyone would want some Tech company spybot sifting through their private experiences is beyond me, but that's definitely what they are doing.
What is Alexa. Lol
There's no way they weren't doing this already.
The setting mentioned in the email was on by default. So they definitely were, they're just removing the ability to turn it off.
I mean if they were doing this already there would be no point in sending this email out. They would have just happily continued letting people think it wasn’t happening while doing it anyway, while not having to deal with the backlash this will generate.
My suspicion is they probably need to announce it now for some legal reason but there's no Amazon device with the power to do this locally so it's definitely always been sent to them.
Now would they delete that right away or analyse it first, I kinda think they would have always done the latter.
I mean there’s no legal reason that would exist now that didn’t before.
My guess is that they did honor the setting, but that was because the amount of people that used it was so low vs the total number of people that used the devices. Now with smart speaker adoption rates declining, and their desire to train AI, they have to dip into the pool of people that opted not to share.
For anyone with existing Home Assistant setup, the Home Assistant Voice Preview is pretty good alternative, when it comes to voice control of HA. The setup is very easy. If you want conversational functionality, you could even hook it up to an LLM, cloud or local. It can also be used for media playback and it's got an aux out port.
I used to use Google Home Mini for voice control of Home Assistant. The Voice Preview replaced that rather nicely.
The difference between a pi and open voice?
I'm using a Pi Zero as a voice satellite with an additional mic hat and a speaker hanging off the audio output and it's ... ok
There's definitely much lower WAF with this option
The voice assistant has built-in audio which appears to be high (enough) quality and considering it's case, power, etc, not to mention funding the advancement of open source voice control, it's just overall “better”
If you've got a Pi lying around with a mic & speaker, definitely give it a go
No idea, haven't used those. The HA Voice is open source through and through.
That's tempting, and not a hideous price either.
Alexa! Install Linux!
🔴 I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.
alexa! install an oligarchy!
Yeah, just avoid the oligarchy tech
I agree. Although it’s nearly impossible at this point. Especially with Amazon running a significant portion of the internet with AWS. Each one of us most likely touches an Amazon server multiple times a day, even if we don’t have any Amazon subscriptions.
true, but there's a lot you can do on the hardware side with an arduino-or esp32/pi pico if you need networking.
Like the other person said, you can at least control what you interact with directly. So you cancel your Prime subscription and turn your lights with your hand instead of an Echo but you don’t worry so much about trying to figure out if any of the several companies involved in making [product] have some form of attachment to AWS.
And there will be some level of consumption in this horrible system that’s not gunna be good in order for you to not be horribly depressed but people can shed more than they think and alternatives do exist for many of the ones you might put at lower priority.
That doesn't matter. You only need to worry about boycotting things within your control, like Amazon shopping and their consumer products. AWS is profitable, but so is Amazon.com.
Buying something at a different store is always a dub even if that store is using AWS on the backend.
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