A voice assistant is a microphone in the kitchen, the living room and sometimes the bedroom. It is fair to ask where the things you say to it end up.
With most big-brand smart speakers, the speaker listens for its wake word by itself, then sends what you say next to the company's servers to be understood and answered. That is why they need an account, and why most of them stop understanding you when the internet drops.
There is another way to build one, and it is how ours works: everything happens on a hub in your house.
How an assistant on the hub works
From the moment you speak to the moment it answers there are 4 steps, and all 4 happen on the hub, the compact computer that lives in your house:
1It hears its name. You choose the name: Chris, Buddy, Nana, even one of the kids' names.
2It makes out the words. Your voice is turned into text on the hub, not sent away to be transcribed.
3It works out the answer from what it knows about your home: the rooms, the lights, the scenes, the alarm.
4It says the answer out loud on the screen that heard you, and shows the words it heard, so you always know what it understood.
Nothing you say has to travel to a company's cloud to be understood. There is no account to make, and with the internet down it still answers for the house. Your chat history stays put too: what you ask on your phone stays on your phone, the kitchen panel keeps the family's, and either clears in one tap.
A name you choose, said your way
Because the wake word is a name you pick rather than a brand, the house answers to whatever suits your family. Say the name once when you set it up and the house tells you what it heard. If it heard something odd, one tap teaches it your way of saying it.
It also knows your home before you speak. The names of your rooms, lights and scenes are loaded in advance, so "hallway light" is heard as the hallway light, and a device you rename is learned under its new name.
What it is good at
The house: "What's open?" "The back door and the kitchen window." "Is the alarm on?" "Turn off all the lights."
Plain speech: "I'm cold" nudges the heating up 2°, and "make the lounge cosy" dims the lights. There are no commands to learn.
Lists: "Add milk, eggs and bread to the shopping list" puts all 3 on every phone in the house, and "What's on the list?" reads it back.
Small jobs: "Set a pasta timer for 10 minutes", a quick sum, "Will it rain tomorrow?", "When's sunset?"
New scenes: "Make a scene called Reading with the lamp at 40%." It reads back what it will make and saves it only when you say yes.
If it only half hears you, it asks again rather than guessing, and it never switches something you did not name.
Where it stops, honestly
It needs a screen that listens, such as a wall panel or a tablet in the room. On any phone you can type the same questions instead.
The weather, the radio and your music services need the internet, because they live outside the house. So do general-knowledge questions: those get a short answer from a free online encyclopaedia, with no account.
It can set the alarm, after asking "Are you sure?" first. It never switches the alarm off: that takes a PIN on a screen, so a shout through the letterbox gets nowhere.
How to get it
Voice and Ask run on the same hub as the cameras, the alarm and the heating, so there is no subscription and no account to keep. Tell us on WhatsApp which rooms you would like to talk to, and we will suggest where a panel or a tablet makes sense and put a fixed price in writing.