Welp my parents alexa will mysteriously disappear one of these days i visit them.
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Haha and the suckers paid for the priviledge!
I just assumed they were already doing this and have never considered them to be something anyone should ever put in their home.
One year, my parents bought all their adult children the Echo for Christmas. Mine got lost in the mail. So they ordered me another one. Also got lost somehow! I was the only one who didn't get one. Christmas blessings!
Poor robbers gonna get spied now.
Who the fuck buys these things anyway
most people do unfortunately
My parents, my parents church, my in-laws, my sister, my wife's friends, my old dentist, my old doctor, and several acquaintances.
So that's like.... At least 3 people.
I know multiple people who stick these in every room of their houses. They’re surprisingly super popular among normies in the US.
Did people who care about privacy actually buy Echos?...
neither of us did, no.
Anyone have experience with locally run alternatives to this kind of device? Voice recognition technology has gotten pretty good by now, it should be possible
I use Home Assistant and I'm getting ready to swap over to their local voice control from Google devices.
You can source your own devices or use their device when it becomes available.
Just a heads-up, Home Assistant Voice Preview edition is pretty rough right now. It's nowhere near good enough that I'd buy one for every room.
A lot of the issues are just software related, so there's no reason it can't get as good as a commercial device.
This guy explains it well: https://youtu.be/L4ONmyjG6ec
That being said, it's neat, and I'm running both the tts and stt locally on my Home Assistant server! No Internet access at all, entirely local! It's remarkable.
If you want to see what I mean, you can setup tts and stt on your Home Assistant without buying the hardware device and just talk to it with your phone and the app installed. You'll see it's kind of slow to respond and really gets hung up trying to parse the commands.
I don't regret getting the hardware, it's really neat, but I'm not going to rush to get any more at this time. I'll wait a while for the software side to catch up.
Is this something you could run off of a modded echo?
no but if you can find them at MSRP a pi is like 40$+arbitrary audio in hardware. with the right software, that will do everything an echo can, plus so much fucking more, on device, without touching the networks, in a smaller form factor.
Someone posted a build where they modded Google home mini, but that required a custom PCB. I can only assume it would be the same or more difficult with an Amazon device.
I've looked into and honestly they cover most of what people use the listening device for. Only issue is that they can be a bit slow and are often quite expensive. Haven't checked in over a year though and tech like this can advance quickly.
We've gotten too used to the price of tech being so low because we're almost always the product. The Meta VR headsets, Alexa, Google Home, anything where data from us can be harvested, they'll gladly subsidize to help get it into our homes.
I'm really hoping the HA voice stuff keeps getting better and better, we need it if we're ever going to get people away from these data harvesting "assistants"
the prices for that aren't even especially low, though.
remember, it's also massively inflated because all the cutting edge fab capacity is being used to build entropy-and-scam machines, and before that, scamming machines. I remember when you could build a damn solid gaming computer with current gen hardware for 500$ without much sacrifice.
if you want to know what most of this actually costs, look at something like the MSRP on the raspberry pi. a general purpose chip that's wildly overpowered for what 99% of these devices do.
look at how much you'll pay for an esp32 or, if that's too beefy for your application, an esp8266. arduino if you want prehistoric oldschool italian luxury. it's like 5$ plus 0.10-15 dollars per sensor, and the fifteen dollar sensors are for exotic stuff like air quality. You don't even have to code as often as not-somebody already made and open sourced it; you just need to play legos.
Yeah that's a no from me dawg
I guess those few echoes left out there will hear a couple final words soon enough:
"Bye bye"
Hell, I would almost want to buy one so I could wait until the fateful day and then say "Echo, get the fuck out!" and unplug it.