As I said downstream, I tried Snips and it's great, so I hope it catches on. Everything works as advertised, it sends all recognized commands to MQTT so integration with anything else is pretty much instant, and detection works well.

I thought of buying the hardware to make the Snips device (to support the company financially as well), but I realized that I use my Echo mostly for Spotify (as it's a bit too crippled to use for much else), which Snips wouldn't be able to support.

I still might get/build one for all the home automation I can't use the Echo for, but a big use case is immediately removed if it can't play Spotify.