[joshvm]

I think this is a sad way to go. Hardware is super expensive to develop and the key IP here is in the software. There's probably some fancy microphone tech, but ultimately you could (should?) run Mycroft on a Raspberry Pi with an edge accelerator device.

Technically I think we're getting close to a good offline system. Home Assistant solves the practical aspect of controlling systems and triggered routines - it really works well, at least on par with vendor software. Speech recognition models are usable and getting better. The interesting "glue" is parsing the commands into something reasonable and I think open source LLMs are likely to be the answer. See Open Assistant [0] for example. It doesn't solve the knowledge base issue (e.g. people seem to use Alexa either as a very fancy egg timer, or for querying facts), but it would probably allow for very natural interaction with the device and the model could just translate a query into a command that triggers an action.

My impression is that Amazon's approach (I have no knowledge of what goes on inside) has been to build fairly complicated subsystems to handle very specific queries. Each "Skill" has to be separately developed and if you ask something outside a fairly rigid grammar, the device has no idea.

[0] https://github.com/LAION-AI/Open-Assistant