I know it's surveillance stuff and that it's bad, but does anyone know if it's possible to have a similar thing to Alexa that can be set up using a private/local server? Because the concept is pretty cool, just the entire company and cloud service attached isn't cool
yep, HA with a satellite device running wyoming protocol. you gotta be a bit savvy to get it all working together, but it's incredibly worth it to run your own devices.
Yup! I just recently did it for us. Raspberry Pi and a 7inch touchscreen. Had Claude Code working on it for me and I was able to get the weather on it, time, linked our Google Calendar to it to also allow us to add events. Then I have a Chores tab that we can add and check off, and a groceries tab that we can add things to when we realize we need it. Then when it's time for groceries, you click one button and it sends the list to Google Tasks and you can check off on your phone as you get the items.
People set up home assistant in their homes and then can modify these devices to be local voice assistants processing their requests from a local model on the server not from the cloud. It's a deep rabbit hole you can go down but rewarding
There are loads of guides. You just need some hardware, time and a willingness to tinker.
Hell, you don't even need a guide, you can even just go to ChatGPT or Claude and say you need help building a local AI server to act as a private personal voice assistant with home assistant integration for home automation and it'll pretty much regurgitate everyone else's guides, tailored to your specific needs.
My 4 year old is convinced the garage door is sentient, and if he uses good manners it will open for him.
Build a computer powerful enough to run a local reasoning model. This is critically important to me, maybe not to you. If you use a model that does ANYTHING outside of your local network, your risk factor increases exponentially. Doesn't matter for lots of things, critically important for my own house.
Set your local model up to be accessible on your LAN. You can really do this however you want. For example, I set up a local web interface that allows anyone in my household with an account to access the model and talk to it. I have to personally make and manage accounts directly, and technically this is in and of itself a risk factor, but I dare say I've done enough here to ensure it's safe. The same risk as any other agentic machine learning model.
Then you just hook up devices. Doors, thermostats, televisions, speakers, lights, computers, consoles, washer/dryer, everything you can think of. At this point if there's a way my system can control it, I've hooked it up.
The real icing on the cake though is that I also have microphones all over the house, and I can speak directly to the reasoning model to invoke commands and requests, like these Alexas and Google Homes and whatnot. What's the stupidest use case of this? I have a cup-warmer embedded into my desk, I just tell the system to turn it on, and the system knows to automatically turn it off after 2 hours (because I drink my tea very slowly in the mornings).
It's stuff like that. I say "Good morning, let's warm my tea", and the system turns my cup warmer on with a ping and an LED (so I don't light my wooden desk on fire). The last person leaves the living room, and the system turns off the lights automatically so we're not wasting electricity (he says, running servers at home). Someone says "It's a bit chilly in here", and the model does active reasoning to determine how much it should turn up the thermostat by (this part is critical).
Here's a cautionary tale though, because this stuff isn't always perfect:
When I set up the system originally, I set it up such that when my and my fiance's phones are not in the house (accessible via our Bluetooth network or Wifi), we are gone, so turn the air conditioner off completely. The obvious immediate flaw happened when my father came to visit. We both left to go to work, and about an hour later he called to tell me it was boiling in the living room, and he couldn't turn down the thermostat (because it was locked, because we had left). Now the system looks for a person on the property before turning the thermostat off (and I can control it remotely anyway).
Next thing I want to do is hook all of this up to a robot that can do my laundry autonomously or something, but robot parts are surprisingly expensive.
Just an FYI jailbreaking isn’t stopping them from using your data. These companies expect you to do it and use you as testing then report the vulnerabilities. These companies know
I've got Home assistant in my home. Its ridiculously more powerful than Alexa. Its highly customizable across any brands. And, you can setup the voice assistant so that its actually powered by an AI model, not like Alexa which is not AI powered, which costs like a few bucks per month at most. So you can just speak to it like would speak to chatgpt, you don't have to use any code words or stuff like that.
Its pretty incredible imho. The learning curve can be a bit steep. But just ask an AI for some help and thats it.. .
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u/Thenderick 7h ago
I know it's surveillance stuff and that it's bad, but does anyone know if it's possible to have a similar thing to Alexa that can be set up using a private/local server? Because the concept is pretty cool, just the entire company and cloud service attached isn't cool