Privacy Tool Spotlight: Home Assistant Assist

About a year ago we wrote about leaving the traditional "Smart Home" ecosystems in favor of "Home Assistant," the private, self-hosted solution. It's been a great transition for us for multiple reasons. To begin with, everything is managed locally, so there's no dependency on an internet connection or cloud services. There are no logs being kept and reviewed for whatever reason, such as lifelogging where daily routines are mapped out. But this goes well beyond controlling the lights or robot vacuum through a convenient web dashboard. The real power is through voice control. Having the ability to manage your home through a smart speaker is tremendous. And in traditional smart home ecosystems that comes at a cost to privacy. Those smart speakers are always listening because they have to. They're waiting for the magic "wake word" to start triggering an action. On top of that, everything that is said to the speaker, from commands to questions and searches, is transcribed and logged.…