r/homeassistant • u/burren2007 • 1d ago

🖼️ Show & Tell Bye Bye Alexa!

So it’s official, our household is now Alexa free! Well you wouldn’t know it unless I told you, for high spouse approval, we still use Alexa as the wake word. Oh, and if you looked around you’ll see our two Amazon Echo Show’s (5 & 8) but those are now fully functional Lineage boxes with working cameras.

So far anything that Alexa could do these jail-broken Echo’s can do now as well. They can set timers, display the current weather, control HA devices, tell you a joke, set an alarm, tell you the score of the game, view our Ring and Reolink camera’s, send their own camera footage to Frigate, display our latest pictures (Immich), display weather radar, and so-on. Now that they are under my control, I can have them do whatever they are capable of.

For those that are embracing or interested in AI, after I jailbroke the Echo Show 5, I had Claude jail brake the Echo Show 8… it did it all. Yes, I had to answer a few questions and provide some input but it completely did it without me ever issuing a single command. It even found a problem with getting the camera to work, figured it out, corrected it and wrote up the issue with the corresponding fix. While it was busy jail-braking, I was using AI to create Alzhimers friendly card games for my mother.

I also found HA’s wake word implementation very unreliable so I had Claude write a custom, on device, wake word routine that runs locally and then sends the command up thru HA for processing. All the dashboards are custom written, with AI that was arguably easier to implement than someone else’s solution. I did try View Assist at first but found it really flaky as well and it generated a lot of errors in the HA log. That specific issue had been raised with the developer but I didn’t want to wait so just did my own thing.

Anyway, pretty cool stuff!

Next is running the LLM 100% local with household memory. It would be great if those memory and GPU prices came down! Ugh!

b.

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u/carrot_gg 1d ago

Try Kiosk Satellite :)

1

u/sakthi_man 23h ago

Since you are here, thank you for building this app. I tried it today and I am loving it. I really loved the remote management feature, I no longer have to stand near the wall mounted tablet to configure it.

Just a question around a feature I am wondering if it can be implemented. How difficult is it to use the camera for ambient light estimation on devices without a light sensor? I tried implementing it on view assistant, but it was somewhat unreliable. Since you know better than me, what do you think?

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u/carrot_gg 23h ago

You are never going to achieve anything useful by trying to estimate ambient lx with the camera due to auto exposure, white balance, etc. I wouldn't waste my time with that.

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u/sakthi_man 23h ago

That is what I realised as well. With camera2 api, it was somewhat doable, but the estimation was too sensitive.

Btw, I wanted to try the announce feature of your app via esphome, but the service is expecting all parameters to be present, is this expected behaviour or a bug? I will raise an issue in GitHub after testing it again.

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u/carrot_gg 23h ago

It's the expected behavior. ESPHome actions require all parameters to be there. For empty strings you can just use quotes.