The era of open voice assistants

Can someone describe the use case here? I don't quite understand what its purpose is.

Is this a fully-private, open source alternative to Alexa, that by definition requires a CPU locally to run ?

Is the device supposed to be the nerve center of IoT devices ?

Can it access the Wifi to do web crawls on command (music, google, etc)?

If you have home automation, surely you've run into this situation when Comcast flakes (or similar):

"OK, Google, turn lights on" "Check your connection and try again"

As far as I can tell, if you have Home Assistant + this new device, you've fixed that problem.

The nerve center would be your Home Assistant instance, which is not this device. You can run Home Assistant on whatever hardware you like, including options sold by Nabu Casa.

This device provides the microphone, speaker, and WiFi to do wake-word detection, capture your input, send it off to your HA instance, and reply to you with HA’s processed response. Whether your HA instance phones out to the internet to produce the response is up to you and how you’ve configured it.