HACKER Q&A
📣 leobg

Hackable Alternative for Alexa / Echo Show?


Any suggestions for replacing Alexa, specifically an Echo Show, with a hackable device?

I'm getting tired of Amazon annoying me with suggestions ("By the way, did you know..."), and crippling my Amazon Music Subscription. Whereas, a few weeks before, it would just play the requested song, I now get "Here's a playlist with songs similar to XYZ", and a plug to upgrade my subscription.

Any suggestions how to replace the Echo Show's functionality with a more open, hackable device?

I was thinking about hacking something together with Python and OpenAI's Whisper for speech recognition, perhaps. But maybe someone has already done something like this?

The main features we've been using personally:

- "Play 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' by The Beatles" - "Add salt to the todo list" sends a HTTP request to a shopping list that's shared between family members (we use Dynalist) - "Drop-in at grandma's" to video call grandma's Echo Show


  👤 nshm Accepted Answer ✓
You need a Raspberry Pi with respeaker microphone. Many assistants to install around - for example https://github.com/iamsrp/dexter and many more.

Whisper is a bit slow on RPI and not working well for short phrases. It is more focused on long transcription like podcasts. You can try Vosk instead https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api