Ask HN: What is the Duck Duck Go of smart speakers?

> smart speakers

Can we please give them their real name, "smart microphones".

Disturbing when you spell it out like that isn't it?

(Alexa = Amazons microphone)

Mycroft, but you probably have to roll your own hardware. They do have a product though, should ship later this year:

https://mycroft.ai/

What about Sonos or Bose? Speakers that you can configure without any assistant? What's are the requirements of smart speakers according to you?

Search is, by it's nature, something which "must" be centralized. We can't all run our own search engines- it'd take too much data & compute to index & rank the internet. So there's a bunch of managed services, like Google Search, like Duck Duck Go.

I don't think there are any notable products that compete with Google Home. Google Home is a very big tent operation, with a vast array of devices from all manners of companies under it. Trying to imagine where we'd start at building products against that is almost unimaginable.

Instead, look to protocols. What protocols might be created that could allow communities & ecosystems to start up? Chromecast itself was built on an open protocol, DIAL[1], spearheaded by Netflix, for taking over screens. Today, the web has a very successful protocol the Presentation API[2], that allows for sending content to screens/speakers about us. Currently the proprietary Chromecast protocol is the primary & perhaps only implementation of this. The same Secondary Screen Working Group has however shipped a draft[3]- a year ago- of Open Screen Protocol, an service providing interface for devices to expose & consumers to push content to the devices from, which is an open, intercompatible way of making the Presentation API happen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_and_Launch

[2] https://w3c.github.io/presentation-api/

[3] https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/8973

Beware the false economy of a so-called “smart” anything; without the underlying data collection and commercial implications thereof, there’s little likelihood that these devices could cover their productization costs.

I think a key feature of a smart speaker is the voice assistant. The only privacy aware I know of is Almond (AKA Genie) from Stanford[1]. I don't think there is any commercial speaker using Almond out there. However, Im betting you could DIY it.

[1] https://genie.stanford.edu/