Yup, my parents have Google Home and Alexa, and my brother has Alexa. And here I am, the only one in the family who works in tech with neither. In fact, I got a free Google Home and gave it away because I don’t want it anywhere near my home network.
One of these days I’ll figure out how to DIY it, but until then, I just use my phone (GrapheneOS, so some protections there) to play music and look stuff up.
I got a free Google Home and gave it away
To an enemy, I hope! Otherwise, you should’ve just thrown it out, or stripped it for parts or something.
I got a free Google Home and gave it away because I don’t want it anywhere near my home network.
You should have destroyed it.
There is www.home-assistant.io but that might be too much for your needs.
I like having something in the garage. It’s in a place where I only stay when I’m working on something and my hands are super dirty. It can be isolated to a vlan by itself.
But if my hands are covered in oil. I like being able to yell at it to play music and not get one more thing dirty.
Makes sense. I’m also interested in getting something like it, I just don’t want anything by Google or Amazon, and I’ve been too lazy to go the DIY route.
When I’m working in my garage, I’m usually listening to an audiobook, and all I need to do to pause is bump a button on the side with the back of my hand or something. Or sometimes I’ll listen to a playlist. But if I’m working on something in the garage, it’s usually not for very long (e.g. maybe an oil change, brake job, or headlights), so I’m usually in and out in 30 min to an hour. Some people love working in their garage though, I personally see it as a chore that I do to save some time and money.
With a bit of work homeassistant can be a quite good voice assistant.
You can either revive some old android device and use that, or get an ECHO M5 for ~13€ and hook that one up.
You can even run some local Ollama AI and use that for the voice assistant nowadays. It’s quite useful and home assistant can be integrated into music / audiobooks aswell with something like Music Assistant 2.0
I’ve been meaning to set up a voice assistant with Google’s old AIY voice kit and Mycroft for a long time now (so long, in fact, that at the time I started thinking about it those things hadn’t been discontinued yet) and then trying to integrate that with Home Assistant. (See also: Picroft, Mycroft Home Assistant integration)
If I still wanted to use that voice kit hardware, what would be the best software to put on it these days?
