I'm uncomfortable with having to create an account and be connected to a cloud service in order to have a working home voice assistant. To be fair, Mycroft does say that if you're willing to do some work, you can get local processing of speech recognition, but they don't seem they're very encouraging about that option.

I made my own home voice assistant [0] that's pretty primitive, but runs entirely locally on a Raspberry Pi (except when, e.g., I ask it to tell me the weather forecast, and it goes to a weather website to fetch it).

I'd like to see more development that's truly privacy-focussed along those lines.

[0] https://7402.org/blog/2021/diy-home-voice-assistant-privacy-...

Is this still going somewhere? Their Kickstarter for the second model was a huge fail. The service is cloud based and not self hosted so you really have to trust them at their word on privacy which is not much different than say Apple (sans the vendor lock in)

And the service doesn't seem to have improved much since I last tried it (though to be honest neither have Siri and Alexa, not sure about Google). All voice assistants are still really stupid and scripted. Even a simple question like "what did you just say?" or "turn off the bedroom lights and turn the air purifier on". I have to say "Hey Siri every time to deliver it in bite sized chunks". Or sometimes it thinks I said on instead of off and doesn't take into account that the light was already on so why would I have asked for that??

I really hoped we'd be a lot further along, it's almost 10 years since these came out. AI was supposed to give these things a big boost but I don't see it. A commodore 64 could run the logic part of a Siri conversation (not the recognition of course)

You can't really compare Siri & even Alexa to Google. That things is at a whole different level.

Anyway, we really need a fully offline and private voice assistant. Maybe this sort of things are what should GNU and Apache work on next?

Oh is Google so much better? I consider them the worst in privacy so I only tried them once years ago. At that time their assistant was pretty immature. The others I found better but they have not advanced since then. I didn't know that Google has. I'll give it a try then.

Since then I've had echo dots and now a HomePod mini because I don't trust Amazon so much either.

But I agree we need that. The big reason for cloud processing is that it has to recognize millions of people with differing accents. For home hosted use that's not needed. I wouldn't mind training it for a while with my voice. Even in the 90s dragon dictate worked pretty great after reading it a short story.

I was talking about technology. There are tons of side by side comparisions on YouTube showing the distance between Google and others.

Privacy is a completely different subject and whatever we feel about these companies it is very hard to quantify.

Ok I don't really do YouTube either, save the embedded clip here and there :) So I wasn't aware of that. Videos as a content format don't really appeal to me anyway.

I did check one and I don't find it a huge difference. In particular I noticed that Google is much better at keeping state for follow-up questions. Something that bothers me with Siri.

But the other answers were pretty much the same. I won't change it for that :)