Hacker News Reader

You could also build on top of one of the open source versions, eg Mycroft.

That's interesting. Basically the only reason I don't use Alexa or something like this is that I don't want 3rd party listening to me 24/7, so an open source alternative would be of great use. But I don't understand: it says it's open-source, yet the first thing I have to do is to create an account on their platform. So, what's that "open source" thing I ought to download and install, is it just a client? Can I use the thing completely self-hosted?

Also, how does it compare in terms of usability to Alexa/Siri? In fact, I'm not even sure I've seen a good open-source TTS at this point, nothing comparable to proprietary stuff. Is this mycroft thing better?

I've recently started playing with a Home Assistant set up and came across Snips (https://snips.ai/). A bunch of Raspberry Pis with microphones running Snips is what I'm looking to try next. IMO, the offline/on-device processing is a key differentiator.

I haven't tried, but from what I've gathered you can either run it yourself on eg a raspberry pie or use their infrastructure instead if you don't want the hassle and expense. I have the same concerns.

Here's another project btw, which seems less commercial:

https://jasperproject.github.io/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com