alexa-avs-sample-app

I managed to get bilingual voice activation (Alexa and Siri/HomeKit - maybe Google Home in future) working with Home Assistant, homebridge, pi-mote, raspberry pi 3 and four energenie sockets. (In the US I guess you could use etekcity sockets) https://home-assistant.io https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge https://energenie4u.co.uk/catalogue/product/ENER314 https://energenie4u.co.uk/catalogue/product/ENER002-4 I wouldn't call it simple to set up, but it was cheap - about £70 (not including Alexa device, which could even be the same pi - https://github.com/alexa/alexa-avs-sample-app/wiki/Raspberry... )

If you make your own Alexa device you can do so. It's simple enough with a Raspberry Pi and a microphone. Unfortunately you lose the far-field mics is you do this. https://github.com/alexa/alexa-avs-sample-app https://github.com/Kitt-AI/snowboy

Yes, activation is local. You can see this in the documentation for making your own Alexa device. [0] To my knowledge all the cloud-based systems use something like this for both privacy and technical reasons. Sensory includes a chart showing the CPU requirements for wake word activation and accuracy. [1] The main reason custom names aren't allowed is accuracy and training time. Even with a well-trained model like Sensory's using 90 MIPS the wakeword isn't recognized 10.2% of the time and has false acceptance. Using a set wakeword could also allow for a FPGA or custom chip to have the wakeword model hard-coded for a much lower power hit for mobile applications. One of the other wakeword solutions, Kitt-AI Snowboy [2] allows for personal hotwords, but it takes some effort to make a personal training set and this isn't nearly as robust as w