Nova: Building My Own Echo, One Weird Problem at a Time

Nova: Building My Own Echo, One Weird Problem at a Time
I have wanted an Alexa that doesn't phone home for years. Every commercial voice assistant is a microphone in your house wired to someone else's computer, and the whole point of a homelab is that my stuff runs on my stuff. So I built one. It's called Nova, it lives on my LAN, and nothing it hears has to leave the property. The interesting part of this project wasn't the tool itself. It was making…

Nova Assistant: It was only a matter of time

Nova Assistant: It was only a matter of time
My house is definitely smart to the extreme. I have a lot of automation that runs all aspects of the house, security with AI, and dedicated servers for automation and AI. One example of how I have already wired some of these things together, is a Python service using Ollama & Llava as a false positive checker for Frigate. That being said, all of this private goodness is still connected to Amazon's Alexa ecosystem for…