Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?

1

Mycroft.AI

I've heard of Mycroft before but have no personal experience with it: https://mycroft.ai It seems like they have an open source client that you can run on your own hardware but it's still dependent on the backend services that Mycroft-the-company provides. Perhaps their privacy stance is more palatable to you, though? I think there used to be a project that was fully on-device but it got bought and consumed by Sonos.

#Chatbots #AI Assistant #Knowledge Sharing 119 social mentions

2

Homebridge.io

#Home #Home Intelligence #Smarthome 164 social mentions

3

Node-RED

I can vouch for Rhasspy, it's an amazing and flexible piece of software, though it does require some setup and tech knowledge (albeit with a usable web GUI); and it's very DIY on defining the actual voice commands. I recommend pairing it with Node-RED [0] for routing commands to devices, it has plugins for most things. The only thing I struggled with was getting the wake-word config right: I could never find the right balance point where it responded every time, without also having annoying false positives, so I ended up turning it off. It does support multiple wake-word engines; I'm gonna have another go with Picovoice Porcupine now that they're opened up custom wake-word training for free. I'm most heavily experienced with Rhasspy's sister project, voice2json [1], which I used to build a voice-controlled car jukebox [2], and it's been working fantastically. (It triggers from a Bluetooth remote, so no wake-word issues.) For hardware, Raspberry 3/4 perform quite well, and strong recommend for ReSpeaker [3] for audio (either usb or 4-mic hat). [0] https://nodered.org/ [1] http://voice2json.org/ [2] https://github.com/lukifer/voicetunes [3] https://www.seeedstudio.com/category/Speech-Recognition-c-44.html.

#DevOps Tools #Automation #API Tools 120 social mentions

4

Almond

During school, our AI class had a guest lecture from Monaco Lam talking about Almond [1]. I personally don’t have much interest in virtual assistants, so I haven’t actually tried to use it, but curious to see if anyone else has heard of it of it or worked on the project. [1] https://almond.stanford.edu/.

#Chatbots #Knowledge Sharing #AI Assistant 10 social mentions