The era of open voice assistants

Well, the various Echo devices were allegedly built as loss leaders in the hope people would use them to make orders on Amazon. This is backed by the most active open source project on GitHub, which already has extensive support for voice pipelines both with and without LLMs, and is likely priced sensibly.

A lot has changed in the open source ecosystem since commercial assistants were first launched. We have reliable open source wakeword detectors, and cheap/free LLMs can do the intent parsing, response generation, and even action calling.