Yeah this feels like scaremongering when this is literally already the case anyway. Where do you think your voice is going? The echo is just a microphone and speaker. It can’t process anything.
> Amazon is switching on local voice recognition processing, promising users of some of its latest Echo smart speakers and smart displays that they can have their Alexa commands avoid the cloud completely... taps into the retail giant's homegrown AZ1 Neural Edge chipset.. followed Google, Apple, and others in creating its own custom silicon. While the AZ1 may not have been able to power the whole Alexa experience, it was focused instead on specific voice recognition features.
(Echo 4 is one of the few Zigbee hub options with US firmware)
If Echo Zigbee devices will effectively be bricked from their current offline purpose and use cases, it could motivate attempts to re-purpose the hardware. Has nothing been learned from the recent Sonos debacle?