How to add voice control without Amazon or Google
Practical local voice control for Home Assistant and privacy-focused smart homes — Home Assistant Voice PE, Apple HomePod/Siri, and the open Matter route.
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Voice control without Amazon or Google means leaning on local processing and accepting a few tradeoffs. Here’s how to do it right.
The Home Assistant voice path
The most capable local voice option is the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition — dedicated voice-satellite hardware built around an ESP32-S3 with an XMOS audio chip and dual far-field microphones. It connects to your network over 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and talks to your Home Assistant server, where the speech pipeline (speech-to-text, intent handling, text-to-speech) runs. You choose whether that pipeline runs fully locally on your server or uses Home Assistant Cloud — either way it never goes to Amazon or Google. If you want to run it fully on-device, our comparison of the Piper and Whisper local voice engines covers the speech-to-text and text-to-speech halves. If you still want Google Home as a backup front end without going all-in on it, see Home Assistant with Google Home fallback.
Wake-word detection runs on the device using the microWakeWord engine, with “Okay Nabu,” “Hey Jarvis,” and “Hey Mycroft” available out of the box — the on-device counterpart to openWakeWord, which instead runs on your server for satellites that cannot do the listening themselves. (The board does carry Bluetooth 5.0, but it reaches Home Assistant over Wi-Fi, and it doesn’t run “Rhasspy” as an on-board engine.)
Setup is straightforward: power it over USB-C, join it to Wi-Fi, and adopt it in Home Assistant. The honest downsides versus Alexa: natural-language understanding is more literal, so clear commands like “turn on the living room lights” work better than vague ones, and you’ll get the best results with a local LLM or Home Assistant’s Assist intents configured.
Pair the satellite with a hub like Home Assistant Green running your Home Assistant server (the Home Assistant Yellow works too, though it was discontinued in October 2025).
Apple HomePod as a local-leaning Siri
Apple’s HomePod devices are a middle ground. HomeKit runs on your local network, and Siri handles many requests on-device, though some still reach Apple’s servers. The trade-off is Apple ecosystem lock-in — everything flows through your Apple ID and HomeKit.
Add an Apple HomePod mini or a second-gen Apple HomePod, then expose Home Assistant entities to HomeKit using Home Assistant’s HomeKit Bridge. You can then control Home Assistant devices by voice through Siri. You’ll need an iOS device for setup. This works well if you’re already in Apple’s world; if not, the value drops.
Aqara and Matter: the open route
The Aqara Hub M3 runs Zigbee devices locally and also acts as a Thread border router and Matter controller. Pair it with Aqara gear like the Aqara Smart Lock U200 and Aqara Motion Sensor P2 for routines that keep working if the internet drops.
Matter is maturing as a local-first protocol. The Shelly Plus 1 and Shelly Plus 2PM integrate locally with Home Assistant over their native API (these Gen2 ‘Plus’ models have no native Matter - that arrived with Shelly’s Gen3 and Gen4 lines). Run the Matter server on a Home Assistant Green with a ZBT-1 stick (now discontinued; the Connect ZBT-2 is its successor) - or a Home Assistant Yellow (discontinued, but its Thread border router radio is built in) - for a vendor-agnostic setup.
The limitation: Matter does not itself provide a voice assistant. For local-only voice on a Matter setup, you still pair it with Home Assistant Voice or an Apple/HomeKit voice front end.
The Hubitat alternative
The Hubitat Elevation C8 runs automations locally with no cloud dependency. It has no built-in voice hardware, but it pairs with voice front ends that don’t phone home to Amazon/Google — namely Apple HomeKit and the Home Assistant voice path above. Bridge Hubitat into Home Assistant to combine Hubitat’s solid Z-Wave/Zigbee handling with Home Assistant’s voice options.
What you’ll sacrifice
Local voice means more literal language understanding than Alexa, fewer “skills,” and more setup. The upside is privacy and operation that survives an internet outage.
Quick verdict
The Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition is the best pure-local pick — dedicated Wi-Fi hardware with on-device wake-word detection that pairs with Home Assistant Green or the discontinued-but-capable Yellow. Apple HomeKit + HomePod suits those already in Apple’s ecosystem. Aqara + Matter is the most open foundation, though you’ll add a voice front end on top.