Echo Show 8 to Home Assistant: The Short Version

I had a first-generation Echo Show 8 sitting in a drawer, one of the ones I pulled when I moved the house off Alexa. Instead of tossing it I wiped Amazon off it completely and turned it into a Home Assistant dashboard with a voice assistant built in. It’s been running on my kitchen counter for a few weeks now.

If you’ve been wondering whether there’s any decent local voice hardware out there, this is a third answer nobody brings up. The two people always name are the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition and the FutureProofHomes Satellite1.1, and they’re both good. But an old Echo Show gets you a screen and a mic together for the price of a used gadget.

This post is the short version - why I did it and what it’s like to live with. If you want the actual step-by-step, with hashes, commands, and the full package layout, I wrote a complete build guide separately.

What you end up with

Once it’s flashed, the Echo Show is just an Android tablet running LineageOS. No Google, no Amazon, no accounts. It boots straight into View Assist, a community project that turns the tablet into a Home Assistant kiosk. You get:

• A wall dashboard that’s always awake: clock, weather, calendar, whatever Lovelace views you point it at.
• A local wake word (“Alexa” still works as the word, which is funny) running on the device with microWakeWord.
• A voice satellite tied into Home Assistant’s Assist pipeline. Ask for the time, set a timer, run a scene, turn on lights.
• A media player entity, so it can play announcements, text-to-speech, or music from Music Assistant.
• Touch control of the same dashboard for when you’d rather tap than talk.

It’s a screen and a mic in one, which the Voice PE isn’t. Mine sits on the counter showing the clock and the weather, and I talk to it when my hands are full.

The catches

Some of this bit me, so here’s what you’re signing up for. It’s not 100% local, and that’s a choice. The everyday commands, timers, lights, locks, “what’s the weather”, get matched locally, right on my Home Assistant box. Anything more free-form I let fall through to a cloud LLM (Gemini), with a local Ollama model as the backup for when the cloud is slow or down. The wake word runs on the device itself. You could push the language part local too if you’ve got a strong enough server, but I liked the hybrid: fast and private for the stuff I say constantly, smart for the weird one-off questions.

There’s no camera out of the box. The prebuilt LineageOS build doesn’t see the camera at all, so no video calls and no using it as a little cam. A community patch set has since gotten the OV9734 camera working on this exact device, but it isn’t a flashable download; you apply the patches and build LineageOS yourself. It lives on AC power, because the ROM turns off deep sleep, so you leave it plugged in: fine for a wall or counter display, useless as a portable tablet.

You can brick it. Getting Lineage on here means running a boot exploit, flashing a recovery, and sideloading the ROM over USB. Plenty of people have done it without drama, but it’s your device on the line, so back up the stock firmware before you touch anything. And get the model right. Mine is the first-gen Echo Show 8 from 2019, codename crown. Every other Echo Show and Fire tablet needs its own package, and grabbing the wrong one is how devices die, so check yours before you start. The Echo Show 8s Amazon sells new today, the 2023 3rd generation and the 2025 4th generation, are both different hardware, and this guide does not cover either. Buy the 2019 one used; see the note below.

What it takes

I’m not going to write out every flashing step, because the XDA guides are better than anything I’d retype and a stale copy of flash instructions is exactly how people brick things. The shape of it:

1. Back up the stock firmware to your PC. Do this first, every time. It’s your way back.
2. Unlock the bootloader and flash a recovery using the “amonet” exploit for this device.
3. Sideload LineageOS 18.1 (Android 11) over ADB. Skip Google Apps, you don’t want them.
4. Install View Assist on the tablet and its companion piece inside Home Assistant, then point it at your server.

Read these two XDA threads all the way through before you buy anything: the unlock and unbrick guide and the LineageOS 18.1 ROM thread for the same device. Set aside an evening, a USB cable you trust, and a Windows or Linux PC with ADB.

The software doing the work

The flashing is the scary part, but View Assist is what makes the thing useful. It’s a Home Assistant community project that turns any cheap Android screen into a dashboard and voice satellite. Its companion app takes over as the launcher and runs the mic, wake word, dashboard, and audio, and it’s lighter on the device than the full Home Assistant Companion app, which matters when you’ve only got a gig of RAM. All the real configuration lives in Home Assistant, not on the tablet. The Show is just a screen and a microphone, and the server does the thinking.

Worth it, or just buy something?

Depends what you care about. For the least hassle and fully local voice, get the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition; it’s official, supported, and made for exactly this, and I put it head to head with the Satellite1 over here. For the best mic in a noisy room, the Satellite1.1, if you can catch it in stock. For a real touchscreen wall panel with none of the flashing, something like the Shelly Wall Display XL. And for a screen and voice for used-gadget money, if you like the project, reflash an Echo Show. It’s the only option here that reuses hardware you might already own and gets Amazon off it completely.

Would I do it again

The Voice PE is the easy answer, and flashing an Echo Show is the fun one. For the price of a used gadget I’ve got a permanent counter display with a voice assistant in it, running on my own server with Amazon nowhere in the loop. Just go in knowing the tradeoffs: back up first, match the package to your exact model, and don’t expect fully local voice out of a 1 GB tablet unless you’ve got a real server behind it.

If you’ve got an old Echo Show in a drawer, it’s a good weekend. Beats the landfill.