Comment by drnick1

This. The only "smart" things allowed in my home are those under my control. This means devices that work over Zigbee, or that that run free firmware natively (like ESP32-based devices), or that can be hacked to run free firmware. Everything is orchestrated via Home Assistant and in its own VLAN. It's surprising how far you can get. For example, I recently set up a voice assistant by wiring together a few Home Assistant components and a small local LLM (Qwen 4B). Response times are basically on par with commercial solutions like Alexa, and all processing is done locally.