Amazon plans to give Alexa an AI overhaul — and a monthly subscription price
Amazon is upgrading its decade-old Alexa voice assistant with generative AI and plans to charge a monthly subscription fee to offset the cost of the technology.
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With Sonos shitting the bed with its app update and now the prospect of Alexa being destroyed by fees and AI, my smart home infrastructure is falling apart. So disappointing.
Never use anything that depends on the Internet for your smart home. There are entirely offline text to speech and voice recognition plugins/libraries for home assistant.
Yeah I learned this lesson by starting with Smartthings and grew to hate the lack of reliability pretty quickly. Home Assistant and a raspberry pi has been significantly better.
What are you using for microphones?
I can't ask a question? I am in the Alexa infrastructure and would like to change and I don't know what's good to use instead. People are really shitty.
Don't take it personally. It's just a few trolls who think they're superior. Your question is valid and I'm also interested in alternatives too. I have home assistant, but it's another thing entirely to more easily swap out Alexa for some equally well supported mic/speaker hardware. I'm sure this will change with people being motivated not to give Amazon subscription fees and 'to finally' cut the online requirements. I would love local voice control so that I'm not reliant on phone apps if the internet goes out.
Is there good app support for Home Assistant? Like a one stop shop or is it spread over the apps of the various pieces of equipment?
Depends somewhat. Home Assistant has its own app that works pretty well. Generally other apps don't integrate with Home Assistant, but rather the other way around with Home Assistant having a plug-in to allow it to control and interact with other hardware/software. Everything is controlled/managed by Home Assistant so when you need to issue commands or setup triggers its your one stop shop.
I know there are voice control plugins for Home Assistant that are reviewed reasonably well, but I don't personally use them so I can't say what models of mic work well or not. My usage is pretty minimal with simple timers and/or things like presence and temperature sensors being sufficient to meet all my automation needs supplemented by the occasional custom UI button on my Home Assistant dashboard accessible through the app or web interface. Personally the rule I try to follow for all my IoT devices is to avoid Wifi if at all possible in favor of standard mesh network tech like Zigbee or Z-Wave that way it's literally impossible for my "smart devices" to call out to the Internet without me manually installing some kind of bridging software in Home Assistant.
Thank you so much for your detailed answer. This is going to be something I take a real look at.
So I got curious and did a little research. Home assistant itself provides several tutorials for setting up voice controls. There are several options to choose from. The simplest to get up and running seems like signing up for home assistant cloud and paying a monthly fee, although that's also the least private and most costly option. At the other extreme you can go entirely DIY by picking up a cheap dev board for around $14, flashing it with ESPHome and hooking it up to your local voice assistant setup.
I haven't personally used any of this as I've said previously, but everything I've read seems reasonable and it sounds like it's the generally accepted way to go about doing these things with Home Assistant.
Edit: Reading the reviews of the ATOM Echo it seems like a lot of people complain about the mic and speaker quality and issues with it going into sleep mode. A more expensive but possibly better option might be one of the ESP32 S3 Box models flashed with ESPHome, although once again I have not personally used any of this so I can't say whether the complaints about the ATOM Echo hold water or if the S3 Box is better. There also seems to be a Assist app for at least Android, so if you don't want a dedicated hardware device you might be able to make do with just your phone.
Edit 2: This also looks like it might be a great option. It looks a little more polished and ready to go, and is supported by ESPHome.
Great information, thank you.
I too would like to change from Alexa echos to something else. But I don't know what devices are readily with omni-directional mics and easy to migrate to. I use Alexa for simplicity but would gladly fill the gap with Home assistant and recommendations on good replacement mic/speakers.
Too bad we can't root our Alexa equipment and use them.
It’s coming. Slowly. But it’s coming.
I haven't tried it myself (tho I'm planning to do so soon), but check Onju voice, it tries to do something kinda similar.
I hope someone tries do pull that on an echo dot. Good hardware, shit software.
Edit: Update with related links.
The Onju Github i forgot before, tho it's linked in pcbway. It has instructions to set it up along with home assistant and even a matrix bridge.
Onju voice satellite is a different project using the same custom pcb. This one looks better integrated with home assistant and has an actual wakeword system (unlike og onju, which doesn't have one by design). This one feels more like "better private alexa for home assistant".
Home Assistant is a great alternative. It gets better and better as all Google and Alexa get worse and worse.
What are you using for microphones?
Why the downvotes? this is a legitimate good question as there are many available and people may have important experiences to share. Looking to set up my own someday (hopefully soon) and am interested in what has worked well for people as well.
Probably because they've asked it four times in this post
If only any of those questions had a legit answer D: I’m curious too.
Bluetooth and USB speakerphones seem to work fairly well as both mic and speaker. I think thr sennheiser sp20 has been in a couple tinkerers posts I've seen.
Alexa has had AI backing its services for the better part of a decade.
Source: I worked on some of it.
Not fees though.
This is why I went with HomeKit devices. I do not understand why people trust Amazon or Google, their business models are not pro-consumer.
If Apple pulled at one of the maneuvers these two have, there would be a flood of articles condemning them. No one expects Amazon or Google to respect you.
It's hilarious you think Apple is in any way pro-consumer. Apple is all about their walled gardens, but they're a trap. Their entire business model is designed to use various underhanded means to entice you into their ecosystem and at every step make it increasingly difficult to escape it all so that they can keep extracting money from you. Google and Microsoft aren't much better but they are better ironically because they're not as good at disguising their bait and traps as Apple is.
I mean yeah. The only reason anyone is surprised when apple pulls shit like this is because they're aggressively anti-consumer in their pricing and hardware design (parts pairing, poor reparability, etc.). People assume because they're so flagrantly anti-consumer with their hardware, they can afford to not be so anti-consumer with their software. This is wrong, of course. They're a publicly traded company, they'll milk their users for every cent they can.
Yes. I understand the people who don't use Apple products think they are smarter than those who do. Your list of common tropes is tiresome.
The reality is quite far from what you imagine. People who actually understand technology, people who are in the tech industry use Apple products at a higher rather than those who are not.
Instead of Apples well thought out walled garden, fools happily pay extra to play in Google/Amazon/Microsofts chain linked dirt pit. It's hilarious what lengths people go to pretend that is a better experience; that rusty chain link with barbed wire is superior to walls
You will learn eventually
It's why I've avoided anything smarthome tied to any particular vendor.
My endpoint devices are almost entirely Zwave or Zigbee/Matter based. I started out with a SmartThings hub but migrated it all to Home Assistant last year. HA has honestly had easier integrations than SmartThings did and supports almost anything under the sun.
I don't have to worry about suddenly losing control of my devices and the only 'subscription' associated with it all is $15/year for a domain name to make setting up remote access easier. This approach requires a little more research, but it opens up the ability to mix and match devices however you'd like. Absolutely zero regrets.
Are you using microphones or is it entirely app based? And if so what microphones are you using?
I'm not currently, but I do know that HA has made specific pushes to improve voice-control over the past year. Should be numerous blog posts on their website about it.
Everyone learns for a first time, often through a negative experience. You should take the opportunity to promote FOSS alternatives rather than semi-gloat about your foresight.
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