WanderSpeaker
Local voice assistant — Amazon confirmed Alexa recordings stored indefinitely until manually deleted, Amazon Alexa+ uploads all voice to cloud with no opt-out (March 2025), Google Assistant sends voice to Google for ad targeting.
Smart HomeAbout
Amazon confirmed in 2019 that Alexa voice recordings are stored indefinitely unless manually deleted by users — and that a small team of human reviewers listens to recordings to improve accuracy. Amazon Alexa+ (announced March 28, 2025) uploads all voice recordings to Amazon's servers with no opt-out option. Google Assistant voice data is used to improve Google's advertising models. Siri sends audio clips to Apple for human review — Apple paid $95M to settle a class action in 2021 over Siri privacy violations. Every major voice assistant routes your home conversations through corporate servers. WanderSpeaker uses faster-whisper for on-device speech recognition and Piper for TTS — both run fully locally on Raspberry Pi hardware. No audio leaves your home. Alexa Together was discontinued by Amazon in June 2024; WanderSpeaker fills that gap for WanderElder users specifically.
Features
- No audio ever sent to cloud: faster-whisper speech recognition runs entirely on-device
- Piper TTS: text-to-speech on-device — no Google/Amazon voice synthesis required
- Amazon Alexa+ gap: no-cloud alternative after March 2025 forced cloud upload announcement
- Alexa Together discontinued June 2024: elder assistant functionality without Amazon infrastructure
- No human reviewers: your conversations are not reviewed by Amazon contractor staff
- WanderDash integration: voice commands for local home intelligence panel
- Luen AI backend: local LLM for contextual responses — never cloud-processed
- Accessibility-first: dysphoria-aware voice options, adjustable speech rate, hearing-impaired modes
- Wake word on-device: detection runs locally, never streaming to a server
- Works offline: full functionality with no internet connection required