* changing the wake word was a pain
* having a Home account is essentially mandatory (kind of defeating the point)
* speech synthesis was really bad
* It needed a lot of rhetorical help to get useful responses.
Just getting to that point involved several hours of fairly hardcore debugging and even then basic issues like reliable mic input still existed.
I also couldn't find reasonably priced (<$100) speakers/mics in an Alexa form factor, but it wouldn't be fair to blame that on the mycroft team.
On the flip side, I do not, I repeat, DO NOT recommend giving their team money for pretty much any reason. They've been struggling to put together any working hardware (and promising the opposite) for years through a genuine comedy of errors. I think the most recent design iteration of MycroftV2 is something like a Raspberry Pi on a daughterboard in a 3D-printed case. I still check in on their blog and subreddit every few months to see what's changed, and everytime I'm rewarded with additional details on what seems to be one of the most incompetent engineering organizations I've ever heard of.
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-says-it-has-over-10-000-...
In a lot of ways, it doesn't really matter why they're not producing results, so much as the fact that they're not producing them. I mean, check out the list of remaining action items in their last "Production Update"[1]. This came over 8 months since shipping what were supposed to be the Mark II devkits, and almost four years(!) after they announced work on the Mark II in early 2018 [2], which has since gone through about a zillion different design changes. I won't claim to be an expert, but having had even a bit of experience with product development of this kind, this is not the happy path to getting consumer electronics shipped.
[1] https://mycroft.ai/blog/mycroft-manufacturing-and-product-up...
[2] https://mycroft.ai/blog/specs-new-voice-assistant-device-see...
After you get it to work, I'm not sure if your server would have a worse data set for speech recognition etc, maybe, maybe not. I'm guessing it should be all right because they are using a Mozilla free data set (which you contribute to by default I think, if you use their server).
Commands which work nicely which we use all the time: "Hi Mycroft, set timer to X minutes." "play news", "set alarm to 6 am", "what's the temperature?", "will it rain?", "what's the time in Paris?".
I wrote METAR and TAF module for it to get more detailed weather (and learn some Python).
I backed the mark2 on kickstarter which they have been promising is better and will ship anytime now - for a few years...
It seems like they have an open source client that you can run on your own hardware but it's still dependent on the backend services that Mycroft-the-company provides. Perhaps their privacy stance is more palatable to you, though?
I think there used to be a project that was fully on-device but it got bought and consumed by Sonos