Still waiting for your smart speaker to get smarter? You might be waiting a long time. According to How-To Geek, commercial smart speakers have barely improved since the first Echo launched in 2014 — and an old phone or a DIY build can now do the job better, with more control and more privacy.
Smart speaker (Credits: How-To Geek)
When Alexa speakers first arrived, they felt like the future: talking to your home like the crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But more than a decade later, the core features are largely the same. Even newer AI additions like Alexa+ have left reviewers underwhelmed, and closed ecosystems still limit which devices you can use and how complex your routines can be.
Turn Your Old Android Phone Into a Smart Speaker
If you have an old Android phone lying around, it already has everything a smart speaker needs: a microphone, Wi-Fi, a speaker, and even a screen for showing information. The free, open-source Home Assistant software makes the conversion simple.
Install the Home Assistant Companion app and use its experimental Assist for Android feature. Your phone can then listen for wake words such as Hey Jarvis and control your smart home through Home Assistant’s voice assistant. Best of all, wake word detection runs entirely on the phone, so your commands are not sent to a remote server. The main trade-off is that a phone lacks the microphone arrays of a dedicated speaker, so detection can struggle in noisy rooms.
Build Your Own Smart Speaker With an ESP32
If microphone quality matters to you, the alternative is to build your own speaker using an ESP32, a small and inexpensive microcontroller popular for smart home projects. Plenty of ESP32-based devices can be turned into Home Assistant voice assistants, giving you a dedicated, always-listening device that you fully control.
The bottom line: instead of buying another closed smart speaker that may never get meaningfully better, repurposing hardware you already own — or building your own — gives you a smarter, more private smart home for less money.
Also Read: Turn Your Old Android Phone Into a Guest Remote Anyone Can Understand and A $50 Office PC Can Run Your Homelab, But Check These 5 Things First
Source: How-To Geek — read the full story there.