• manualoverride@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Owning that space in peoples homes is the point, I bought them just for controlling my lights via voice, but the screen started as a clock and weather report and now shows adverts almost constantly.

    I’m looking at HomeAssistant as a replacement but you have to realise that unless you are tech savvy, you probably don’t even know HomeAssistant exists let alone know how to set it up for your requirements.

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        No, it just requires people to run normal fucking updates like literally EVERY piece of software does, even the canned bullshit from corpos.

        • manualoverride@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Having to do any manual step is beyond what the Echo devices require, they just reboot themselves randomly one day and boom, a whole new new set of features for advertisers.

          • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Ohh, fully auto updates turned on by default on a shitty IoT device? A hacker’s wet dream.

            • manualoverride@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Not sure who you think you are advising here, but I suspect Amazon is making sure their echo devices are on the high end of security, any vulnerability will get a lot of press attention.

              For Home Assistant and other more open devices this is the problem, you either accept a lot of tinkering ensuring it’s updated, working and secure, or it fails the wife/parent test.

              Apple, Google or Amazon devices are just too easy in comparison, but you have to put up with the intrusion and ads.

              A lot more people are willing to sacrifice data and adverts for convenience.

    • idunnololz@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Even with home assistant set up, I still have Google assistant handling the voice control aspect. I might be wrong but I don’t think home assistant comes with any voice controls. You still need something else if you want to control it with voice.

      Edit: it looks like there is something built into HA called Assist. I tried it a bit and while the basics work, I find it harder to use than google assistant.

      • person420@lemmynsfw.com
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        2 months ago

        Getting Home Assistant to play nicely with Google without using their Nabu Casa service definitely is a hurdle, but once you get over it, it’s super nice. I ended up just blocking Google DNS inside my network to force all the Google home devices to use my internal DNS to fix the https/hairpin NAT issue. It wasn’t a big deal since my kids are getting older and I needed to block outbound DNS in general since they’re getting savvy enough to get around my content filtering.

        • idunnololz@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Oh I just paid for Nabu Casa. It’s only $65 USD / yr and it supports the dev of HA. I’m happy to pay for it for how much I get out of HA.