I literally just bought a satellite 1.1. I bought an atom echo to POC whether I could get reasonable wake word + stt + LLM running locally with good latency with the intention of building my own speaker afterwards.

I went with the satellite 1.1 because:

1. I haven't done a good audio driver circuit since university
2. Getting 2-3 PCBs printed and SMD soldered sounds like a PITA
3. I didn't want to design an acoustic cavity
4. Satellite 1.1 w/ xmos is just really hard to compete with, and the on-board humidity and temperature and stuff removes the need for me to have a distinct sensor for those in that room

It's a bit more expensive but I'm really optimistic. It hasn't arrived yet, I'll lyk how I like it when it is delivered!

I saw a project (echomuse) that converts an EchoDot gen 2 into an HA speaker that I thought about doing as well but I didn't really wanna spend $100+time when I could spend $200 and no time for a better product and support a cool company.

I went the hacked Echo show route and am very happy. Works on Echo Show 5 Gen 1 & 2 and 8 Gen 1.

Amazon recently patched the exploit so any freshly updated units are not going to work. But anything listed on eBay at this moment is likely safe. Both the dev maintaining LineageOS and the dev maintaining the View Assistant Companion App that both make this work have been on a tear lately fixing and improving things. It's been great.

I recycled all my Google homes by selling them on Facebook Marketplace.

Saving this for later cause I want to do the same, except with my home pods.

Do NOT go with the respeaker. It's a buggy mess. I have two on my desk that will not respond to flashing the DFU and Seeed has no interest in fixing it.

The Satellite looks awesome but very pricey.

I did see someone had converted an Amazon Show 5 into a wake-worded voice assistant that would first try to match up HA automations then pass it off to an agent if it didn't match anything local. I ordered up a couple to try that with.

https://github.com/RealDeco/SendspinZero

i collect vintage stereo equipment so i just built one of these. and plugged it in through the tape input.

i did the simple no screen no button option. crazy cheap and very easy to put together even with my very rudimentary soldiering skills.

think they have versions with built in amplifiers too which would probably work well for gutting an existing device and reusing its speaker.

i also am still using a few chromecast devices and music assistant/sendspin plays well with those too. need to find a good replacement for those. maybe i can put a degoogled android or nura or something on chromecast/roku/firestick. havent look into it much yet.

if you wanna spend some money, ive seen very nice all on one speakers for ma/ss

good luck!

I run a proxmox cluster that includes 2 old thinkpads, so I pass their audio hardware (mic and speaker) through to a vm with a stack of openwakeword, whisper for stt, and piper for tts. I figured I've got mics and speakers in the server rack already, may as well use them. I have an assortment of snapclient speakers around the home as well, working on adding mics and fully integrating them as voice satellites too.