You have to run an LLM of your own and link it, if you want quality even close to approaching Google, but the Home Assistant with the Nabu Casa “Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition” speakers are working well enough for me. I don’t use it for much beyond controlling my home automation components, though. But it’s still very early tech anf it doesn’t understand all that much unless you add a lot of your own configurations. I eventually plan to add an LLM, but even just running on the home assistant yellow hardware with a raspberry pi compute module 5 works ok for the basics though there is a slight delay.

I haven’t tried, but Nabu Casa also offers a subscription service for the voice processing if you want something more robust and can’t host your own LLM, but thst means sending your data out, even if they have good privacy policies, which I’m not interested in, because while I somewhat trust Nabu Casa’s current business model and policies, being hosted in the US means it’s susceptible to the current regime’s police-state policies. I’m waiting for hardware costs to recover from the AI bubble to self host an LLM, personally.

Yeah, the issue is that it drove up the price to justify price-gouging even though it’s likely these won’t actually get purchased. They shouldn’t reserve nearly all of their product for pending transactions. They should fulfill actual demand before theoretical ones. This is clearly only possible because of the industry consolidation into essentially a monopoly. If they still had real competitors, they’d have to actually sell for a fair price and they’d be concerned that they likely won’t get paid for these “reservations”.

Yep, Western Digital said they were sold out of drives for all of 2026. Since 2026 is just starting, they haven’t actually produced those drives or gotten actual money for them.

Hopefully the bubble pops soon, though I hate that Americans’ 401Ks and IRAs will take the brunt of the “losses” when it does.

The primary issue is I don’t always access devices from only those 3 systems. If I’m traveling or I wipe my device or get a new one, I would have to add the new key to many servers as authorized keys, and I’d need to have password access enabled in order to add the keys in the first place. Also, I want a key backed up in case of disaster since all of my devices are in my home most of the time. A few people use these systems, but only I maintain them.