As Snowden told us, video and audio recording capabilities of your devices are NSA spying vectors. OSS/Linux is a safeguard against such capabilities. The massive datacenter investments in US will be used to classify us all into a patriotic (for Israel)/Oligarchist social credit score, and every mega tech company can increase profits through NSA cooperation, and are legally obligated to cooperate with all government orders.
Speech to text and speech automation are useful tech, though always listening state sponsored terrorists is a non-NSA targeted path for sweeping future social credit classifications of your past life.
Some small LLMs that can be used for speech to text: https://modal.com/blog/open-source-stt
The HA Voice Preview is a pretty solid device, but you’re right, there isn’t really any ready made Echo/Google Home Mini replacement device - primarily because all those devices are generally sold at a loss, or at cost at best, and subsidised by your data being sold.
You won’t be able to make a Google Home Mini contender for below $50, and at that price most people will opt for the former. Good quality speakers, microphones, local processing (like the XMOS chip in the Voice Preview) all cost money, and there’s no subsidy to be made. Some older Echo devices are rootable, but the hardware tends to be somewhat exotic (meaning no open source support for specialised components), and there’s little ongoing third party support (focus has been on the display-equipped models, and to run Android on them).
All in all, “cheap” and “fully local open source voice assistant” don’t really coexist.
The issue with that is there isn’t an expensive option either. The only thing close is the home assistant voice preview and it’s still very “preview”. There’s not really any way to do it well at any price point right now.
Well yeah, the availability of these more advanced hardware bits is pretty new - for example, all the older GH Minis and Echo devices were running a quite pared down Linux distro with software processing for e.g. wake words.
Transplanting all that to MCUs takes time, but now we have a solid base, a handful of devices/boards that utilise the various XMOS chips, and soon we will be seeing more and more consumer level devices - but again that takes time when there’s no big megacorp behind the project pushing it to completion with bottomless finances and hundreds of engineers.
But you’re not exactly correct on there being no other options. There’s the Satellite1 smart speaker which might be a DIY kit but it does exist. Then there’s the Seeed Studio Respeaker Lite w/ ESP32-S3 to which you can slap a speaker (either directly or a powered speaker through the audio jack). In fact the Respeaker lineup has a handful more options for smart speakers all utilising the various XMOS chips.
Just keep in mind that these speakers are DIY mainly for two reasons:
There WILL be consumer products (hopefully soon) on the market, but again, this is being done by volunteers and small startups with just a handful of people, it takes more time to get them on the market than it does for companies the size of Amazon or Google.