My girlfriend gave me an Alexa assistant as a gift with all good will, since she knows I like technology. I know in terms of privacy it is garbage, however I wonder if there is a safe way to use some functions of this device, perhaps without internet. Some way to hack it or something, do you guys know something about this?
Fast search gave me this ,replacing with open source firmware Mycroft https://hackaday.com/2021/03/22/amazon-echo-gets-open-source-brain-transplant/
Mycroft the company went bust. Not sure if you’d still want to do this with unmaintained software.
You don’t. I did a project involving Mycroft and, while functional, it was awful. Not worth any of the hassle.
Sad. I did not know that.
Although, to be honest, I was sort of expecting it would happen sooner or later. It did not look like the product was ready for mainstream users yet, and the devices at that price must have been tough to sell.
For anyone curious, this message from the CEO has more details: https://web.archive.org/web/20230822232437/https://mycroft.ai/blog/update-from-the-ceo-part-1/
Yeah, the yrice was a lot higher than anyone was expecting, and they changed the design to make them a lot uglier.
Plus they wasted their cash with legal costs fighting patent trolls.