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Comment by lftl | Hacker News Reader

I love this idea. I've wanted to do something similar for a long time, but I was thinking about building a home assistant where the always-on mic was a complete separate board that only listened for wake words and had no internet access. The main mic would only be powered on when the smaller board woke it up. Alias achieves the same thing in a much simpler way to where I might actually consider buying a home assistant now.

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How is this different than an actual echo device as it sits now?

You're still relying on a piece of software to make the wake-word assessment and hand off the audio to the cloud. Now you're just adding more hardware parts to fail.

If your argument is that you trust your software more than Amazon's, then you shouldn't need anything more than a single microphone anyways because why would you surveil yourself?

> ... you shouldn't need anything more than a single microphone anyways because why would you surveil yourself?

For the same reason nginx usually runs as a separate user: people make mistakes and security vulnerabilities happen. Security in depth is a good thing.

Explain how this is an improvement?

I'm wondering this too.

Like hey, let's install some under developed AI from some unknown company with unknown security policies on top of a device with access to hordes of personal data and the ability to make transactions online.

No hacker will EVER think to use it as an attack vector /s

It's open source:

https://github.com/bjoernkarmann/project_alias

I didn't look into Alias deeply, but does it even have network access at all? I don't see a reason it would have to.

It needs it for setup (so you can set up the wake word using your phone), but then after that it can be disconnected.

you just put it on top of your device, instead of needing to modify the electronics of your potentially expensive and complicated home assistant?

Mostly what supermatt said -- this is a lot simpler. Particularly, it's been a long time since I looked, but when I last looked neither Google nor Amazon were offering the voice assistants in nice package where you could bring your own hardware but use their APIs. So beyond the hardware, the project would've also involved building my own voice assistant software as well. Both of those ecosystems have evolved alot so that might not be a hurdle anymore.

Look again:

https://developers.google.com/assistant/sdk/guides/library/p...

https://developer.amazon.com/docs/alexa-voice-service/set-up...

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