Best Alexa smart speaker for the price with great sound & bass - Amazon Echo 3rd Gen (2019) Review
www.cravingtech.com
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.

  • lemmysmash@beehaw.org
    3·
    3 days ago

    You could go even cheaper with something like this: https://arduinoyard.com/dfplayer-mini-with-esp32/

    But here you start hitting a limitation that it won’t be a regular Linux machine anymore, but a microcontroller with its own set of capabilities and interfaces that you’d need to handle.

    For example, in this configuration it would be able to play MP3 files from an SD card, but probably not the web streams (even direct ones) or something of that nature — for that you’d need a different setup, I guess.