Hi…I live in India and home automation is still very rare. I have been buying Sonoff relays first from China and now we have India manufactured/assembled smart relays like Tinxy/Smarteefi/Aziot. Fortunately all these Indian manufacturers have given access to their API token and today my kids configured HA on an old PC and the three mentioned smart switches are now controllable by HA
For the past 8-9 years I have bought many Alexa and Google smart speakers. Can I use these smart speakers to trigger HA? if not, I have seen many videos where HA has its own speakers. Hence want to know what kind of affordable speakers with a mic can I buy for my HA which will work even when internet is down? I am looking for generic unbranded cheap ones costing say 20 dollars or 2000 rupees each
To echo Francis, Alexa devices can also control HA… when there is internet.
In both cases, the easiest option to use them to control your devices that are in Home Assistant is to subscribe to HA Cloud. Also in both cases, there are free options that are described in the docs:
There are also other options using Node-Red or other add-ons (IIRC there’s a Matter-based method as well, but it’s not something I’ve looked into).
There are a number of hardware options to use with HA Assist voice control. The videos you mentioned are likely for the Voice PE, which is probably the best current option, but is outside the price guidelines you mentioned.
There is one more option…Matter.
Install a Matterbridge on HA and invite Google or Alexa to that Matter fabric.
Google/Alexa can then control the Matter devices you share over the Matterbridge and HA will get updated about it and vice versa.
This setup can also be done without doing port forwarding.