A friend was dumping stuff prior to a move. I took all his electro gadgets just to prevent it becoming e-waste.
In the pile of stuff is an Amazon Alexa. Fuck #Amazon. I boycott Amazon and also have principled objections to their snooping, business practices, etc. My choices seem to be:
- trash the Alexa
- donate the Alexa to charity
These are both lousy choices. Donating it as-is would ultimately put it in someone’s house which then feeds Amazon.
Is there another option? I did a quick search and see no FOSS to replace whatever garbage Amazon has on it. It could be attached to the LAN with an egress firewall that blocks cloud access, but I suppose then it is useless, correct?
(update) I added a link to an article that shows what the thing looks like. The article is otherwise irrelevent.
New extra requirement: the user must be able to say “Oh, yeah, no, for sure” without the thing exploding into flames.
(update 2)
There is no product ID info on the device itself. I had to go through a lot of analysis just to find out what the fuck the thing is. Apparently it is an Echo gen 2. So then I looked for a manual. Found this:
https://www.amazon.com/Echo-2nd-Generation-Manual-Guide-ebook/dp/B0793JNBYR/
No PDF manual! WTF. Amazon expects us to subscribe to some Kindle bullshit just to get the manual, or /pay/ the cost of a big mac to get a paper manual. Motherfuckers.
I don’t need it that bad.
You could replace the microcontroller with an ESP32S3 and use the speaker and microphone with Home Assistant/Music Assistant or Willow voice assistant to essentially replace a lot of the real-use functionality: lights, music, and timers that Amazon said itself was almost all of its use according to their data harvesting 😂.
It depends how DIY/electronics savvy you are or if you are looking for a project.