This is in Turkey, not the US. Also not TikTok employees but Telus Digital employees. Shit headline.

Fair points! I’ve been tinkering with Homeassistant for a while now. The community has come very far so I’m hopeful that more advanced features will be added as the user base grows.

Yes, the voice recognition is decent. I mainly wanted a way to control some smart light switches without using a Google device. If you’re looking for something more advanced I don’t have any experience using his tool in that use-case.

Have you heard of Ollama? It’s an LLM engine that you can run at home. The speed, model size, context length, etc. that you can achieve really depends on your hardware. I’m using a low-mid graphics card and 32GB of RAM and get decent performance. Not lightning quick like ChatGPT but fine for simple tasks.

Ollama

Have you heard of Homeassistant? It’s a self-hosted smart home solution that fills a lot of the gaps left by the most smart home tech. They’ve recently added and refined support for various different voice assistants, some of which run completely on your hardware. I have found they have great community support for this project and you can also buy their hardware if you don’t feel like tinkering on a Raspberry Pi or VM. The best thing (IMHO) about Homeassistant is that it is FOSS.

Homeassistant Voice Control

Here’s an article with a bit more detail… but I’m still unclear whether these backdoor commands are hardware circuits or firmware logic.

Bleeping Computer: Undocumented “backdoor” found in Bluetooth chip used by a billion devices

New shoes. My previous pair developed holes behind the toe guard so I got a warranty replacement. My new pair is much lighter, softer, and a better design.