The era of open voice assistants

I'm actually really excited for this!

I noticed recently there weren't any good open source hardware projects for voice assistants with a focus on privacy. There's another project I've been thinking about where I think the privacy aspect is Important, and figuring out a good hardware stack has been a Process. The project I want to work on isn't exactly a voice assistant, but same ultimate hardware requirements

Something I'm kinda curious about: it sounds like they're planning on a sorta batch manufacturing by resellers type of model. Which I guess is pretty standard for hardware sales. But why not do a sorta "group buy" approach? I guess there's nothing stopping it from happening in conjunction

I've had an idea floating around for a site that enables group buys for open source hardware (or 3d printed items), that also acts like or integrates with github wrt forking/remixing

A group buy for an existing product makes sense. Want to buy a 24TB Western Digital hard drive? It’s $350. But if you and your 1000 closest friends get together the price can be $275.

But for a first time unknown product? You get a lot fewer interested parties. Lots of people want to wait for tech reviews and blog posts before committing to it. And group buys being the only way to get them means availability will be inconsistent for the foreseeable future. I don’t want one voice assistant. I want 5-20, one for every space in my house. But I am not prepared to commit to 20 devices of a first run and I am not prepared to buy one and hope I’ll get the opportunity to buy more later if it doesn’t flop. Stability of the supply chain is an important signal to consumers that the device won’t be abandoned.

>> I want 5-20, one for every space in my house.

I don't have a small house, but I'm trying to think why I would need even 5 of these, let alone 20. The majority of the time my family spends together is in the open layout on our main floor where the kitchen flows into the living room with an adjacent sun room off the living room.

I'm genuinely curious why you need so many of these.

I do agree that if you do have a legit use case for so many, buying so many in essentially a first run is a risky thing. Coupled with the ability for this to be supported for more than a fleeting couple of years is also a huge risk.

I have four bedrooms, living/family room, study, office, rumpus room, garage, workshop, and trying to build out a basement with three more rooms. Each of these rooms have some form of smart lighting or devices like TVs or thermostats that people have a much easier time controlling with voice than phone apps. Granted this may sound extravagant but I have a large family so all this space is all very well utilized hence the need for a basement expansion. Again, at $25/room and bought over time the Echo Dots are a really simple way to add very easy to use controls that require almost no user training. We pause the living room TV and “set condition two throughout the fleet” at the end of the day with these devices.

What's condition 2?