I rarely tell people to throw their devices into the sea, but you should throw your Amazon Echo into the sea.
@evacide I could never understand how people could be comfortable with always listening devices like these.
I've considered a few times when I almost was willing to use such a "service" to use one of those "frontends" where you essentially disconnect the mic in such a device and then set up a Raspberry Pi that uses offline voice recognition to first listen for a key phrase and then only send what is said right after -- or to more simply just wire a momentary toggle switch such that the mic isn't physically connected except while the switch is held down. However, long term I've found that we really don't benefit all that much from these devices anyway. It just hasn't even been worth it. The fact is, always listening devices is just asking for trouble even if you trust them.
@homeassistant has integrations with a few open source ones that you can run entirely locally and I've been considering getting or building until I remember that I hate talking to a machine, even if it isn't spying on me.
Would be a good solution if you don't hate that though.
@gbargoud @evacide @homeassistant I know what you mean.
Yeah, I saw Home Assistant. It looks like a really good option. I've thought of using it actually not for talking to, but for controlling devices, but in the end I can't buy any devices that aren't still ultimately going through bad services even if they can function through that. It means having a better app on your device that won't spy on you, but it doesn't fix that the devices you're using are bad in such a case.
These days it's getting so hard to have nice things...
@nazokiyoubinbou @evacide @homeassistant
I've been going hard on Zigbee based home automation. Replaced all of the light switches and blinds and it's been great.
The nice thing is that Zigbee (same with Z-Wave and Matter/Threads) makes a local mesh network that connects to your hub so nothing is going to anyone else.
@gbargoud @evacide @homeassistant Yep. That's the thing to do as much as possible these days.
Sadly, no monies now for me, but I absolutely recommend things that can run on a local FOSS hub 100% like this.
@nazokiyoubinbou @evacide @homeassistant
Most of IKEA's stuff is relatively cheap, decent quality and uses Zigbee but relatively cheap can still add up
@nazokiyoubinbou @evacide Turns out people are almost literally willing to sell their souls for convenience.
@nazokiyoubinbou @evacide In this day and age I'm not prepared to assume all of them have souls to sell