How to control a smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

For many people, an automated smart home is little things that turn into big conveniences over time. The lights turn on when you pull into your driveway, the thermostat downstairs is adjusted from your upstairs bedroom, the robot vacuum works while you’re at the grocery store—you put in a little work and your life gets easier.

However, most smart homes also have a voice assistant, the opposite of quiet, invisible convenience. Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant: They require you to learn specific device names and command structures, while they often get even the simplest command startlingly wrong. And that, of course, is the always-listening corporate microphone that you allow to be used in your home.

There are ways to keep the convenience of a smart home by interrupting the conversation. Some of them include your phone, some special devices, but none of them require you to say the device name. Here is an overview of the best options available.

DIY controllers

home assistant

Home Assistant is its own web page that lets you control almost any device with switches and dials. It’s a lot more than that, but it doesn’t have to look like this. Home Assistant takes more effort to set up than the big tech company’s home control apps, but it’s endlessly customizable. You decide which controls to show and which not to (and in what order) and set up automation that doesn’t require you to install a clunky app for every device on your phone. With certain devices, you can also manage everything locally without being connected to the cloud.

Most enthusiasts run Home Assistant with a Raspberry Pi. Given the device’s current scarcity, it’s good that Home Assistant can work on other hardware as well. Home Assistant also makes a special Pi-based box, Home Assistant Yellow, although it has been on hold for months at a time.

Once Home Assistant is installed and connected to your devices, you will be able to access your equipment through phones, tablets, computers, or the built-in display. You’ll also have easy ways to access it from your Android and iOS phone – more on that in a moment.

Habitat and HomeSeer

If Home Assistant isn’t your thing or you’d rather have separate hardware to control your smart home, Hubitat and HomeSeer are worthy alternatives. Both tend to focus their support on devices that communicate over the Zigbee and Z-Wave radio protocols. And recently, Home Assistant has received more active community development. But both projects offer the same local web control of all your devices, perhaps even more robust local control.