I have one of these shitty little Nest devices in my house to control the lights and play music and it is such a gaslighting piece of shit, I hate it.

Me: "OK Google, turn on Living Room Light", "I'm sorry, there are no lights available right now". My wife: "OK Google, turn on Living Room Light", "OK, turning on Living Room Light".

Me: "OK Google, play Spotify", "I'm sorry, there is no Spotify account connected right now". My wife: "OK Google, play Spotify", "OK, playing Spotify".

And it's always spying on me, always listening.

  • blobjim [he/him]1•4 months ago

    For someone who wants a "dumb" Wi-Fi speaker:

    I think what you want is a DLNA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLNA) speaker but I'm not sure how easy it is to get that working.

    Windows supposedly supports it out fo the box: https://superuser.com/a/1631206

    To play from iOS you may need a speaker that also supports AirPlay.

    idk, it doesn't seem like it's super out of the box, but better than nothing.

    AirPlay seems like the newer protocol since it uses mDNS (invented by Apple I think, but super standard now) instead of UPnP (a more finicky older protocol for service discovery)

    Decent reddit thread on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/q01n3r/any_micless_speakers_for_tv_home_assistant/

    This looked decent: https://www.sonos.com/en-us/shop/one-sl (just don't install the app I guess) (also has ethernet which is cool, so it can be used without wifi)