The era of open voice assistants

My plea / request : Make a home assistant a DROP IN replacement for a standard light switch. It has power, its adds functionality from the get-go (smart lighting), it’s placed in a convenient position for the room and no extra wires etc required.

Look at Shelly light switches.

You've misunderstood what they're asking for. They're asking for Home Assistant hardware (microphone, speaker, wifi) that, instead of being a standalone box taking up space on the counter/table/etc, fits into the hole in the hall where they currently have a lightswitch.

I guess I did misunderstand, because that request seems strange to me. I’m assuming they have more than one switch. Which one should have Home Assistant on it? Seems like an odd deployment strategy. A pi isn’t that big..

No I don't think that's it either. Home assistant runs on a server somewhere still.

What the top level comment is asking for, completely unrelated to the article mind you, is to have a smart device in the form factor of a light switch that you can hook into your home assistant system.

The problem they likely have (I have it too) is that you set HA up and it can control smart plugs, smart thermostats, etc, but it can't control 99% of the existing lights in your house because they are wired to dumb lightswitches. Instead of some mechanical finger flicking a switch or something, why not uninstall the existing light switch and replace it with a smart one.

So my original comment was not a misunderstanding. They are smart switch drop in replacements.

Yeah, you're right. That is a weird request then, or I don't understand it either. I didn't realize something like [1] goes inside your switch. I was expecting a switch with a faceplate combined.

1: https://us.shelly.com/products/shelly-1-gen3