It's actually easier now then ever before. Buy smart bulbs for cheap off of temu. They all integrate with alexa or google home automagically.

I now never touch a light switch.

"Computer dim lights to 40%." I never bother touching a light switch. This guys set up is too complicated. The easy way to do it nowadays is to buy smart devices that integrate with the google or alexa echo system and you just talk to alexa or google to get it to do what you want.

Alexa and Google Home are literally microphones with connections into the cloud

I'm always amazed that everyone seems okay with this, and will even say so when pressed on it. But those same people will get a look in their eyes as if they're going to shit their pants, if someone else picks up their unlocked iPhone and starts scrolling.

I'm amazed that people are afraid of a home assistant in their living room, yet carry a cloud connected microphone+camera around with them all the time (with the added feature of sending GPS tracking data back to the manufacturer, carrier, and apps that you granted location permission to, like a weather app).

If you trust that your phone isn't listening when it's not supposed to, why don't you trust the home assistant (even if it's made by the same manufacturer)?

I 100% agree with you on this. And I don't carry a traditional smartphone for exactly the reasons you mention.

> If you trust that your phone isn't listening when it's not supposed to, why don't you trust the home assistant

Do home assistants claim they are not listening when they are not supposed to?

It's because they have sexts on their phone. A recorder is not as big of a deal. Especially if I'm fully aware that the entity listening to the recording is listening to billions of people and couldn't care less about my one voice.

Even with the microphone switch turned off?

With the microphone switch turned off they don't send audio to the cloud but they're also no longer smart devices. The only words they can detect using local processing are their limited set of wake-words. But using Alexa or Google Home is literally the opposite of an offline smart home system if that's your goal.

Even if you create tasks that can function through a button press or something they still rely on the cloud.

Voice control locally is really hard though. Or at least it used to be. I thick OpenAI Whisper is available for local/offline usage if you build your own wrapper around it? I tried adding (local open-source) voice to my home system about 8 years ago, and again 3 or 4 years ago and it was very rough. It might finally be feasible with the current state of local AI.

For an example, my home robot was named "Marvin" (from H2G2) and the local detection was so poor, this is my list of "matching" wake words.

['Marvin', 'arvin', 'artin', 'marlin', 'marten', 'margaret', 'why are']

They are still smart to the extent you can schedule things to play on it at certain time from another device.

I didn't really value voice control until I had young kids.

> It's actually easier now then ever before.

Agreed, but Alexa fails hard if you have no internet, and my understanding is that Google Home also becomes mostly inoperable.

I've tried Home Assistant but could never get it to work reliably. HomeKit is great and works offline if you have a home hub (an Apple TV, a HomePod, or an iPad).

> Agreed, but Alexa fails hard if you have no internet

It also fails hard with Internet. I’m sick of being on my living room asking Alexa to turn on the light just to get the bedroom light turned on (each room has its own Alexa/Light pair, so there should be no confusion).

Try google assistant. Google assistant actually has a little bit of an LLM in it, so it's a bit smarter.

It's still pretty dumb, though. For example, it'll often misunderstand "turn all the lights off" as turn the lights off or worse, turn the lights on (even though they're already on).

Alexa has been most reliable when a command does not require a third-party cloud service.

For Amazon Basics WiFi smart plugs, the device type can be configured as "Light" instead of "Plug".

Echo 4 works as a Zigbee hub, avoiding dependency on a third-party cloud service.

If they're assigned to the same room as the lights there shouldn't be, but check in the (awful) app which of your Alexa devices picked up your voice.

Walls reflect sound, and things like curtains muffle it, and you might be surprised which device picks up your voice best in different positions.

I had to adjust placement etc. to prevent the Alexa in my son's room from regularly picking up my commands from my room better than the Alexa in my room when the doors are open.

Yes, I had interference at one moment and moved the devices to the farthest points on each room, so that doesn't happen now, but the problem I mentioned before (turning on the wrong light) still happens.

I forgot to say that the problem mostly occurs when I ask Alexa to set the (unspecified, but hopefully the one belonging to the room the corresponding Echo is) light's brightness to X. Sometimes, in that case, it turns on the light from the other room.

I didn't check the audio transcript when this happens though, that's a good one, thanks.

That's an odd one. Not seen that. Lots of aggravating little quirks, though. Annoyingly so many of them would be trivially addressable by users if we just had a way of adding simple rules.

E.g. "this request on this device refers to X", or more generally "when you hear X it probably means Y".

As an alternative, I've spent more time than I should passive-aggressively repeating the same instruction and then flagging every single failure in the app. I have no idea if it makes any difference, or if the things I've done that with that have improved were due to general improvements to their voice recognition, but it gives me some limited satisfaction (I now wonder what the financial tradeoff is of fixing the reported issues vs. any benefit potentially gained by just having the reporting function but sending it straight to the bin to make people feel like they're being heard...)

One of my goals for this year is to experiment with HomeAssistant or similar to at least start to replace or supplement my Alexas.

hah, I've been doing the same, purposefully calling commands I know will fail so I can flag them, even adding a swear word or two so it also gets flagged on their side and, perhaps, someone can then take action. But in the end, the smarter choice (despite being talking about smart devices), was to change my commands to accommodate Alexa’s quirks.

I’ve installed home assistant recently too for the flexibility, but until I get a zigbee stick I still depend on Alexa as the interface with the lights.