Use Amazon Echo WITHOUT Alexa and Cloud connection?!

Hardware
1

just a quick question (I hope)

Prime Day is comming and the Echo devices will probably be very cheap again.

I just want a speaker to send TTS to, and maybe use Spotify on (not important, but nice to have)

(Ideally I’d like to use Snips.Ai in the future for voice comands, but I never got it to work and I have the feeling that project is pretty much dead. So, I’ll settle for any non-cloud solution, just for saying stuff through a speaker.)

Is it possible to use the Echo (Dot) without all that Amazon stuff?! Can I just deny it access to the internet on the router? Will TTS work then?!

Are there alternative (ideally plug and play) solutions just for saying text through a speaker?!

2

Did you ever test this out? I was getting ready to ask a similar question, and this came up as already having been asked.

I basically want a wifi speaker that I can use as a media player that doesn’t rely on the cloud. Did cutting off the ability of the echo to dial out, break it’s functionality as a speaker?