Yaaay, yet another PA that requires me to allow a company to see what I do with my devices and record what's going on in my house.
I wish the toolchain for setting something like this up with open source tools, on a server that you own was better.
Hell, I'd settle for just some nice hardware. I'm sure I could rig something to detect a hotword and then recognize things from a restricted set, but a small microphone at the other end of the room won't cut it. I wish there existed an Amazon Echo clone that I could run my own software on.
I wonder how far we could get with an rPi setup..
I think pretty far. Since I wrote that comment, I got a PS3 Eye camera for $5 (can you believe they're so cheap?) and it has a four microphone array! I'm going to try to write some code to do echo cancellation using the array, hopefully it will make for much clearer sound.