Best Alexa smart speaker for the price with great sound & bass - Amazon Echo 3rd Gen (2019) Review
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Amazon Echo 3rd Gen (2019) Review – Amazon Echo speakers are not new. In fact, this one is the third iteration of Amazon’s smart speakers and it comes with significant upgraded audio quality. With a 3-inch woofer and increased back volume, the bass now feels stronger without having to grab that extra Echo Sub, plus […]

A friend was dumping stuff prior to a move. I took all his electro gadgets just to prevent it becoming e-waste.

In the pile of stuff is an Amazon Alexa. Fuck #Amazon. I boycott Amazon and also have principled objections to their snooping, business practices, etc. My choices seem to be:

  • trash the Alexa
  • donate the Alexa to charity

These are both lousy choices. Donating it as-is would ultimately put it in someone’s house which then feeds Amazon.

Is there another option? I did a quick search and see no FOSS to replace whatever garbage Amazon has on it. It could be attached to the LAN with an egress firewall that blocks cloud access, but I suppose then it is useless, correct?

(update) I added a link to an article that shows what the thing looks like. The article is otherwise irrelevent.

New extra requirement: the user must be able to say “Oh, yeah, no, for sure” without the thing exploding into flames.

(update 2)

There is no product ID info on the device itself. I had to go through a lot of analysis just to find out what the fuck the thing is. Apparently it is an Echo gen 2. So then I looked for a manual. Found this:

https://www.amazon.com/Echo-2nd-Generation-Manual-Guide-ebook/dp/B0793JNBYR/

No PDF manual! WTF. Amazon expects us to subscribe to some Kindle bullshit just to get the manual, or /pay/ the cost of a big mac to get a paper manual. Motherfuckers.

I don’t need it that bad.

(update 3)

related threads:

Although a lot of chatter is about the echo DOT, which is something else.