I Tried to Replace Alexa. Here's Why I Came Crawling Back.

Alexa didn’t screw up.

She worked. Flawlessly, honestly.

Lights flipped. Timers ran. Questions got answered. She did everything I asked — which is exactly what started bothering me.

That kind of smoothness? It comes at a cost.
And I finally decided I wasn’t okay with it.

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Surveillance That Smiles

I don’t love the idea of an always-on mic sitting in my house, built by a company whose business model is me. I tolerated it for too long. Convenience made it easy to ignore.

But over time, I started noticing the little things.
The random wakeups.
The creepy “By the way…” suggestions.
The way a casual comment turned into a product ad the next day.

You can only pretend that’s a coincidence for so long before it just feels stupid.

So I pulled the plug.

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The Local Hope

Home Assistant seemed like the fix. Local control. Open source. Total privacy.
It wasn’t plug-and-play, but I was fine with that. I expected setup pain.

I got the voice assistant working. Tied it into Piper and Whisper. Wired it to my existing automations. Rebuilt a few routines. It felt like progress.

Until I realized something was missing.

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The Black Hole in the Middle

Alexa isn’t smart. But she’s whole.

She’s a box. A mic. A speaker. A brain. All-in-one, press go, done.

Home Assistant? Not so much.

Voice comes in from one process.
Text gets parsed by another.
You hook that to an intent.
Which triggers an automation.
Which (if you're lucky) does the thing.

When it works, it’s satisfying — but it’s also fragile as hell. If one link breaks, you’re stuck yelling at a wall.

I don’t want to rebuild my smart home from patch notes and GitHub issues. I want a light to turn on.

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Then I Got Fancy

I thought I could fix the clunkiness with Ollama.

Local LLM, custom voice intent, smarter responses. It sounded cool.
And it was... until it started giving me paragraphs.

I’d ask if a light was on. It’d give me a TED Talk.

I’m not looking for conversation. I’m looking for confirmation.

Great model. Terrible roommate.

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Why I Went Back (Temporarily)

Here’s the truth: I’m not done with Home Assistant. I like what it stands for. I trust it way more than Amazon. And I know they’re building all-in-one satellite devices that fix most of this.

But I don’t have them yet.

Right now I’ve got limitations. Time. Hardware. Energy. And a house full of people who don’t want to memorize YAML syntax to turn off a lamp.

So I brought Alexa back.
Stripped down. No suggestions. No smart shopping lists. No creepy integrations.
Just a glorified button with a mic — and honestly, she does that job well.