It’s a rundown of the programs you need to run to make an Alexa replacement with Home Assistant connected to these smart speakers. You speak the wake word, and these speakers listen, then what? The speakers then send your audio file to your PC running Home Assistant, and that file gets sent to a program called Whisper, which parses your audio into text. Then you can have it either verbatim do commands (eg, “turn on the kitchen lights”), or run that text through an LLM, which you can run locally on a program called Ollama (it runs a few different flavors of local LLMs from Google, etc). Once the LLM generates a response, you send that text to a program called Piper, which turns the text into an audio file to play back through the smart speakers.

My experience is that the local LLMs are too hard to run unless you have a PC made for them. My Mini PC, which I use to run Home Assistant, had to run such a low quality model the hallucinations made it unusable. I gave it it hour by hour weather data for the day and it for some reason hallucinated temperatures that did not exist and told me to wear a jacket for my 95°F day. They do make LLM ready PCs though.