Just last week I hacked my Echo Show to install a custom OS and hook it into HomeAssistant.

Even gave it a custom wake word, she's Janet now.

HA is pretty clunky and there's a lot of manual setup. But I have a voice assistant contained entirely within my local infrastructure. I'm even planning to wire it up to my local ollama server for actual AI inference behind it.

So far it's exactly as crappy as Alexa, but only because I haven't waded deep enough into configuration. I'm okay with tools being crap when it's my fault instead of the tool being crap because it doesn't make Amazon enough money.

> hacked my Echo Show

Wowsers I did not know this was a thing; TIL, thanks!