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!
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
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.
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.