My girlfriend gave me an Alexa assistant as a gift with all good will, since she knows I like technology. I know in terms of privacy it is garbage, however I wonder if there is a safe way to use some functions of this device, perhaps without internet. Some way to hack it or something, do you guys know something about this?
EDIT: I misread. I don’t know what an Amazon assistant is. I’m talking about an Amazon echo below
I have one at a cabin in the mountains that has no internet or cell service. It required internet access to sync/auth with my phone so I did it at home then moved it to the cabin. I think it needed to be auth’d to an Amazon account, despite never planning or wanting to use it with an account. It was a “prize” from work.
It is literally impossible for it to connect to the internet at its location but it is a pretty good speaker. Perhaps the loneliest IoT device ever, but I’d never use it in a connected state.
If you only want it for a speaker, you could wall it off to prevent Internet access even at home
I had a google thing which I used as a speaker for a bit. If it has Bluetooth, you could just not let it connect to the internet? As an assistant I found it useless, even without privacy concerns, but as a speaker it was alright.
It’s nice that you are trying to find a use for it though! Hopefully it works out long term and you could talk about it the privacy stuff before you get a Facebook Portal next
usually the alexa things do not have Bluetooth and can’t play audio from another device
Fast search gave me this ,replacing with open source firmware Mycroft https://hackaday.com/2021/03/22/amazon-echo-gets-open-source-brain-transplant/
Mycroft the company went bust. Not sure if you’d still want to do this with unmaintained software.
