It’s perfectly possible to have a smart home that does not call home. Home Assistant is an amazing piece of software that can allow smart devices from different manufacturers talk to each other without connecting to a cloud service — all done locally.
This is the only way I would go about it. Maybe in the future if I really want it but really, the more tech, the more vulnerabilities. I'm fine with manually turning things on and off even if it's self hosted.
Put home assistant on a raspberry pi, plug a Zigbee dongle to it, and start connecting smart gadgets to it. Or better yet buy a home assistant Green. You can check the home assistant docs to see if a smart device requires cloud connectivity to work — in general if it connects through Zigbee (or ZWave or Matter) then you’re good, but if it connects through WiFi then it probably is cloud based.
Can confirm. I run Home Assistant and Rhasspy with Sengled bulbs and none of transmits info. The devices themselves aren't generally the issue, it's the hub that operates them that would be collecting and sending the info. Remove that, and you don't have to worry.
You can use microphones wherever with HA and Rhasspy. Rhasspy is just the local voice and intent recognition portion, and HA executes the commands. This means you can have one Rpi in your place managing devices, and then have many different microphone-attached Rpi all over your house forwarding voice recognition intents to do whatever you want it to do. Whatever the mic is attached to will send to the HA instance and tell it what to do. No cloud.
Why do I need a RaspberryPi? I can't use my regular Linux PC? What is a Zigbee dongle and why is it mandatory? What do I do if he device is cloud based?
Your Zigbee light switches won’t do anything unless the machine running Home Assistant is on. Being able to control your lights while the computer isn’t running is really convenient.
Sure! Click the link at the very top of the page! You know, what this entire conversation is theoretically talking about? It takes you to a Home Assistant page and even has some details on their philosophy and links to even more details about their privacy focused philosophy! I thought saying essentially "read the fucking article" would be pretty asshole-ish and wouldn't contribute anything to the conversation, but I also thought that your question contributed nothing, so I downvoted.
Yikes... I read the fucking article, and it explained nothing. I read your comment and understand why you down voted. There you go, @b3an it seems that @tjhart85 simply has a stick up their ass
You can have plenty of smart home stuff without this junk using stuff like home assistant and keeping devices like this from phoning home. Some products won't work at all without an internet connection but plenty still do.