A Smart Home That Isn't Listening
Lights, locks, climate and cameras that answer to you, not to Amazon or Google. Real alternatives to Alexa, running in your own house.
Device count and how much needs replacing. Local voice control with AI is an add-on, typically $800 to $2,500 depending on the hardware it needs.
Typical range, not a quote. Your price comes from the free estimate.
The problem
You wanted convenience and you got a house full of microphones owned by advertising companies. Every device needs its own app. Half of them stop working when the internet drops, which is absurd for a light switch six feet away. Features you paid for have quietly moved behind a subscription, and one product you bought has already been discontinued and switched off remotely.
Why it matters
A smart home does not have to be a surveillance arrangement, and the trade-off you were offered was never a real one. People come to us looking for alternatives to Alexa and usually expect to be sold a different speaker. The real alternative is not another brand of microphone, it is moving the decisions into the building. The hardware in your walls is perfectly capable of running from a small computer in your house instead of from a datacenter, and when it does, several things get better at once. Nothing leaves the property, so there is no company building a record of when you come and go. Everything keeps working when the internet drops, because the decisions are being made in the building. Devices from brands that refuse to speak to each other work together anyway. And nobody can put a feature you already paid for behind a subscription, or switch off a product because it stopped being profitable. The upgrade is a voice assistant that also runs in the house: you can talk to it, it controls the place, and the audio never leaves the building. Answering the question you would reasonably ask about a small local machine doing that, it is the same approach we use to run capable AI offline in places with no internet connection at all.
Scope
What we actually do
- 01One system that runs everything, from a small computer in your house, with a single app instead of eleven
- 02Everything keeps working with the internet unplugged, including lights, locks, climate and schedules
- 03Devices from brands that refuse to work together, made to work together anyway
- 04Nothing phoning home. No usage data leaving the property, no account required to turn on a lamp
- 05Optional voice control that runs in the house, where the audio never leaves the building
- 06Optional local AI that understands ordinary requests instead of memorized phrases, running on your own hardware
- 07Automations built around your actual routine, not the manufacturer's idea of one
- 08Migration from Alexa, Google Home, Ring or Nest, keeping the hardware worth keeping
- 09Aging in place, where the useful part is not gadgetry: lights that come on by themselves at night, a door somebody can check from another room, and nothing that depends on remembering an app
- 10Handover so you can change things yourself, because a smart home you cannot adjust is somebody else's smart home
A house that does what you want, keeps working when the internet does not, and is not reporting to anybody.
Questions
Questions people actually ask
Do I have to throw away my Alexa or Google devices?
No, and that is the part most people get wrong about alternatives to Alexa. Plenty of hardware works fine once it is talking to your system instead of theirs. The speakers with always-on microphones are the ones worth reconsidering, and that is your call to make.
What are the actual alternatives to Alexa if I still want voice control?
A small computer in the house doing the listening and the answering, with the speech recognition running on it. You talk to it much the same way. The difference is that the audio never leaves the building, nothing is filed against an account, and it keeps answering when the internet is out.
Does the voice assistant really not send anything out?
Correct, when it is set up this way. Speech recognition runs on the machine in your house. There is no cloud service involved and you can watch the network to confirm it.
What happens if you get hit by a bus?
The fair question, and the reason we hand over documentation and access at the end. It is built on a widely used open platform with a large community, so you are not dependent on us specifically.
How much does a smart home installation cost?
It depends on how many devices are involved and how many of them have to be replaced, which is why the figure at the top of this page is a range rather than a number. What moves it most is not the size of the house. It is whether the switches, locks and sensors already in your walls can be adopted as they are, and a good many of them can. The free estimate is where that gets settled.
Does any of it still work without internet?
Yes, and that is most of the point. Home automation without internet is the normal state here rather than a fallback, because the decisions are made by a machine in the building. Lights, locks, climate and schedules carry on through an outage. What you lose until the line returns is reaching the house from outside it.
Can a smart home be hacked?
A badly built one, yes, and the usual way in is a cheap device sitting on the same flat network as the laptop with your tax returns on it. Built this way the devices sit on their own segment, nothing needs a hole opened through to the internet, and there is no vendor account to breach in the first place. Network Design is where that separation gets done.
Is local AI actually useful or is it a gimmick?
Useful for natural requests and summarizing what happened in the house. It will not match the largest cloud models at general knowledge. For controlling your own home it is more than enough, and it is private.
Your data stays in your house
This works best as a set
Recording, control and intelligence all running on hardware you own. Nothing leaves the building, and none of it stops working when the internet does.
Security Camera Installation That Records to Your House, Not the Cloud
Your footage stays on your property. No monthly fee. No company holding your video.
DetailsA Smart Home That Isn't Listening
Lights, locks, climate and cameras that answer to you, not to Amazon or Google. Real alternatives to Alexa, running in your own house.
You are hereEverything Working Together
Systems that talk to each other, and alerts that actually reach the right person.
DetailsAlso under smart home and cameras
Get a free estimate
We come out, look at the place, and give you a real number in writing.
Equipment we work with: Home Assistant on dedicated hardware or Proxmox, with Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter and Thread radios, plus local voice via Whisper and Piper and on-premises LLM inference where the AI tier is wanted.