this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Privacy

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I am looking for a voice assistant that is as private as could be its a NEED not a want. I am aware of Mycroft who has discontinued service. I am aware of Rhasspy but it seems like a lot to setup and maintain.

I'm more looking for how to privatize something mainstream on mobile to always have it with me, not a standalone at home device. I'm talking Alexa, Siri, Google assistant, ect. For to do lists, reminders, looking up questions on the web. The usual use cases. In what ways can one make their assistant a little more privacy friendly without not using one? Which assistant is best? Thanks.

Edit: I've considered setting one behind VPN, Behind something like Pihole to block Calling Home from said app or device.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

Home assistant has a built in voice assistant function that can be as simple or robust as you need it to be. The whole thing can be setup fully locally and mine runs easily on an old micro-pc I got for $100. I had it running on a Pi3b originally but the STT and TTS would take 10+ seconds to process, which was too long.

Out of the box it controls local devices, does to-do lists, controls media, sets timers. Setting reminders doesn't work out of the box, but can be setup with some great community templates. Services that require web content like "tell me the news" or "what's the weather in Seattle" need to be either setup with custom commands that have access to the info you want, or need to go through an LLM.

Luckily, the past few months have seen the open home foundation add integrations for LLM's, both local and web-based (chatgpt, gemini, etc) are possible, so you can have it run queries through models run on a local GPU. Though this is currently fairly bleeding edge and I haven't tried running a local LLM myself yet so I can't speak to it's complexity.

More on that here: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/06/07/ai-agents-for-the-smart-home/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I really love the idea of setting this up. I keep up fairly with these types of projects. I just lack the time to implement this myself. Which is why I was mentioning a mainstream service and finding a way to privatize it. I plan to use the assistant for work. I work long hours. By the time I am done for the day I feel cooked. I need a relatively plug and play system. How could I help privatize say an echo dot? Or some other mainstream Voice Assistant.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Here's what I run, this is all 100% local. The most time I spent on this project was actually on getting the wakeword recognition (which is another fairly new function in HA) setup on these old teleconferencing devices: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e2T1ibNw5GeIOUA1eqQbjwp1s2g5h5XN/view

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