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What do you guys think of the idea of smart homes? I could make a basic setup using https://home-assistant.io to control my home temperature and lighting; the tools for doing this are everywhere nowadays and implementation doesn't seem too horrific anymore.
But setting aside what I "can" do, is this something that I "should" do? How can a person implement this without connecting any devices to the internet?
I'll also toss out that if you privacy and non-annoyance are your goals with an out of the box voice assistant, the only real option these days is a HomePod. I built my smart home with combination of Echos throughout the house, and I pretty much regret it now. I wasn't as worried about privacy, but these things are so fucking annoying these days. "Start a timer for 5 minutes." "Okay, do you want to play some bullshit trivia game while you're timer is going?" No, never. Ever. I mean, at least she'll still turn the lights on without spouting back something dumb, but that's just about it. Probably what I'll be doing now is still using the Alexholes as a speaker target with the mute button on all of the time (better spotify integration) and start replacing with siri balls.
Yeah we went with google homes early on and from what I hear they aren't nearly as annoying - but Google is already starting to hint at dropping support for earlier models. I'll look into HomePod, if I did any new ones I'd use something self hosted. I bet at somepoint we'll be able to flash them.
Have you looked into what Home Assistant has been doing with voice lately? This is what I'll be using to finally turn my Echos into muted speaker targets:
https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/using_voice_assistants_overview/
You can even turn old analog phones into HA "microphones" - just pick up the BatPhone/hamburger/banana phone, say "It's movie time" and hang up, and HA will convert your voice to text and run your "movie time" automation.
It's not a jetpack, but it certainly FEELS like living in the future...