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For many people, an automated smart home is a small thing that will bring great convenience over time. Lights come on when you enter the driveway, his upstairs thermostat, which is adjustable from the upstairs bedroom, and a robot vacuum cleaner while you’re at the grocery store.
However, most smart homes also include voice assistants, which are the exact opposite of silent, invisible convenience. Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant: Asked to learn specific device names and command structures. However, even the simplest commands are often surprisingly wrong. And of course, those are company mics that are always listening and are allowed in the house.
There are ways to cut the conversation while still maintaining the convenience of a smart home. Some involve cell phones or dedicated devices, but you don’t have to say the name of the device. Here’s an overview of the best options available.
DIY controller
Kevin Purdy
home assistant
Home Assistant is a self-hosted web page that lets you control almost any device with a switch and dial. It’s more than that, but it doesn’t have to look like that. Home Assistant is more cumbersome to set up than the tech giant’s home control app, but it’s infinitely configurable. Decide which controls to show and which not to show (and in what order), and set up automation without having to install cumbersome apps for each device on your phone. You can also choose to manage everything locally, disconnected from the cloud, using a specific device.
Most enthusiasts run Home Assistant from their Raspberry Pi. Given the current rarity of devices, it’s good that Home Assistant can run on other hardware as well. Home Assistant also makes a dedicated Pi-based box, Home Assistant Yellow, but it’s always been on backorder for months.
After installing Home Assistant and connecting it to your device, you’ll be able to access your gear from your phone, tablet, computer, or attached display. There is also an easy way to access it from your Android or iOS mobile phone. More on this later.
Hubitat and HomeSeer
If you don’t like home assistants or prefer to use different hardware to manage your smart home, Hubitat and HomeSeer are alternatives to watch. Both tend to focus their support on devices that communicate over Zigbee and Z-Wave wireless protocols. And recently, Home Assistant has undergone more active community development. However, both projects offer the same kind of local web-based control for all devices, with perhaps even stronger local-only control.
