Once a category leader, Google Assistant now finds itself lagging behind. Recent updates have reduced capabilities, limited smart home routines, and even removed long-standing features like location-based reminders. For many users, the once-snappy and accurate assistant has become sluggish, unresponsive, or simply wrong. Reddit threads and Google’s own forums are full of complaints about missed commands, misinterpreted requests, or inexplicable failures. Whether it’s a Nest Hub ignoring a perfectly clear “turn off the lights,” or Google’s own documentation contradicting reality, it’s no longer just early adopters noticing the decline—mainstream users are searching for better options.
Home Assistant and the Rise of Local Voice
Enter Home Assistant. Best known for its local-first smart home control, Home Assistant has grown from a tinkerer’s platform to a serious contender in the voice space. Its Voice Assistant Preview is an early but promising step toward a fully local voice interface. The project combines OpenWakeWord for offline wake detection, Piper for on-device text-to-speech, and Whisper for transcription. While it doesn’t yet rival the polished UX of Google or Alexa, it represents a meaningful shift: voice that listens without phoning home. Community feedback on the Home Assistant forums shows users reporting high reliability for context-specific automations—like turning on lights in specific rooms—especially when compared to cloud-based assistants.
Hardware That Speaks for Itself
Home Assistant’s own hardware—like the Home Assistant Green or SkyConnect—offers a powerful base for running voice and automation locally. Setup isn’t necessarily plug-and-play, but documentation and user guides have improved significantly. For privacy-conscious users or those tired of vendor outages, this self-contained approach provides a refreshing change.
The Open-Source Voice Frontier
Meanwhile, the broader open-source voice community is experimenting with other alternatives. Mycroft, though commercially defunct, has inspired forks like OVOS and Neon AI that continue the vision of open, modular voice stacks. While installation can be complex, these projects give power users full control over every component. Others are cobbling together assistants using Coqui TTS, DeepSpeech, and integration layers like Node-RED or MQTT. These projects remain experimental but speak to a growing appetite for DIY voice systems.
Big Tech’s Remaining Contenders
Even Big Tech’s other players—Apple and Amazon—retain relevance. In side-by-side testing shared on Reddit, Siri outperformed Google Assistant in command reliability and local execution, while Alexa offered broader routine customization and better smart home integrations despite its own bloat. Some advanced setups use multiple assistants in tandem, using different wake words or NFC triggers to access the strengths of each engine.
The Conversation Has Moved On
To be clear, none of these systems are perfect. But they reflect a clear direction of travel: away from Google’s increasingly closed, cloud-heavy assistant, and toward solutions that prioritise reliability, transparency, and user agency.
The key takeaway is this: if you’re building a modern smart home in 2025, Google is no longer the obvious default. Users are seeking out voice assistants that work reliably, respect privacy, and keep pace with their evolving setups. Whether that means going all-in on Home Assistant’s local stack, experimenting with open-source speech models, or just recognising that Google’s assistant is past its prime—it’s clear the conversation has moved on. And this time, the most helpful voice might not come from Silicon Valley at all.
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