Definitely not a complete FOSS setup but I decided to go the Apple route a self-hosted Homebridge for non Apple home-kit enabled devices.
badblock has an amazon list :)
Great, they made it public.
If Corporations were people, they’d be disappeared in the night for stuff like this.
Which is why they’re not people.
Why anyone would want some Tech company spybot sifting through their private experiences is beyond me, but that’s definitely what they are doing.
What is Alexa. Lol
There’s no way they weren’t doing this already.
I mean if they were doing this already there would be no point in sending this email out. They would have just happily continued letting people think it wasn’t happening while doing it anyway, while not having to deal with the backlash this will generate.
My suspicion is they probably need to announce it now for some legal reason but there’s no Amazon device with the power to do this locally so it’s definitely always been sent to them.
Now would they delete that right away or analyse it first, I kinda think they would have always done the latter.
I mean there’s no legal reason that would exist now that didn’t before.
My guess is that they did honor the setting, but that was because the amount of people that used it was so low vs the total number of people that used the devices. Now with smart speaker adoption rates declining, and their desire to train AI, they have to dip into the pool of people that opted not to share.
For anyone with existing Home Assistant setup, the Home Assistant Voice Preview is pretty good alternative, when it comes to voice control of HA. The setup is very easy. If you want conversational functionality, you could even hook it up to an LLM, cloud or local. It can also be used for media playback and it’s got an aux out port.
I used to use Google Home Mini for voice control of Home Assistant. The Voice Preview replaced that rather nicely.
The difference between a pi and open voice?
No idea, haven’t used those. The HA Voice is open source through and through.
Alexa! Install Linux!
🔴 I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.
Yeah, just avoid the oligarchy tech
I agree. Although it’s nearly impossible at this point. Especially with Amazon running a significant portion of the internet with AWS. Each one of us most likely touches an Amazon server multiple times a day, even if we don’t have any Amazon subscriptions.
true, but there’s a lot you can do on the hardware side with an arduino-or esp32/pi pico if you need networking.
That doesn’t matter. You only need to worry about boycotting things within your control, like Amazon shopping and their consumer products. AWS is profitable, but so is Amazon.com.
Buying something at a different store is always a dub even if that store is using AWS on the backend.
Which Echo devices ever supported local only processing? They cost about £30. There’s no kit that can do decent voice commands for that money. You’d be lucky to have a device that processes claps to turn the lights on for that.
Just sold my 3 devices and shut down Amazon account. It’s very liberating and I don’t miss it one bit. Have Home Assistant and a couple of really good 2nd hand Sonos speakers.
This is legal, even in the US?
“Even in the US” seems to imply stronger customer and privacy protections on the US.
“This is legal, even there?” sounds pretty “legal bad there” to me.
They literally could just leave the feature on the device, but then you can’t force your users to send you all their data, voices, thoughts and first borns
Fuck Amazon, fuck Bezos
Maybe I misread the actual text, but it sounds like the exact opposite, that it’s going to auto-delete what you say.
They delete the recording from your device…after it has been sent to Amazon to be stored and used limitless.
If you traveled back in time and told J. Edgar Hoover that in the future, the American public voluntarily wire-tapped themselves, he would cream his frilly pink panties.
