Is there a better voice control than alexa for hubitat, I have many voice commands used with my hubitat for a not so techno advanced wife so she can turn things on and off whilst still seated. It seems lately that the time lag between the voice command and the action is taking longer lately. Then the wife being impatient repeats the command and Alexa get well confused. Anyone notice the increased lag or know of a better voice control device, even better if it was not reliant on wifi and could be used on a LAN
Delay for me is only 1 second. I'm assuming you're not located in the US or Canada? This might be an Alexa server problem that is only present with connections outside of North America.
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I am U.K. based, and sometimes the delay is seconds. Shame there is not domething that works on the LAN.
If you're an Apple user, HomeKit can work entirely over your LAN with devices that can locally process voice, including recent iPhones and iPads, Macs, and possibly other devices (maybe the latest Apple Watch?). In other cases, voice may still be processed in the cloud but all commands sent locally. This may be faster than cloud services like Alexa, though unless Amazon is having problems, both are usually pretty fast for me FWIW.
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Have you checked your internet connection? I can't imagine such large latency is a fault of AWS without the service going down. Even in a backwater like Australia 
we don't wait that long for a response.
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I hate Alexa. But I use Alexa all the time!
I don't want my data going into the Amazon AWS cloud.
However, at the present time, in my humble opinion, it's the best option going.
I hear you. One viable option would be to couple home assistant's voice integration with a local LLM to increase its vocabulary. But that means another power hungry PC that needs to be on 24/7. Alexa is just so ......simple, unfortunately.
I dunno. I've had Google, Echo, and Apple. Apple by far has been the speediest and most solid for voice (not that I use it much but my wife uses it a lot). The only thing I feel that is much better on the echo is the intercom system. Other than that it's been apple hands down. The homepod mini's refurbed are 60 bux on ebay with a 1 year warranty. Bonus, they're all homekit hubs.
A different market/price point. But Josh.ai is one of, if not the, best control interfaces, voice or app,
That's for sure 
. Also closed source and only works with Control 4 (also at a totally different price point)
Well thank you all for the input. Personally I have no problem with alexa for voice control except that it is wifi based. Would be great if there was a readily available mike for use on a LAN. I have seen an article where someone has managed to get a subscription free echo speaks working as a voice control with hubitat, hopefully in the future it will become available for all to use with hubitat on a LAN. Until then I will just have to teach wifey a bit of patience and let alexa do her thing.
Josh.ai is completely independent from C4, though it has an integration that can control C4 devices. Josh.ai can do most of what C4 can do outside of some of the fancier distributed AV stuff. The companies used to be closer, but Snap One actually sued Josh.ai over some patents. One can buy a Hubitat-level C4 controller from the previous generation for about $150 on eBay. The only real reason for a Hubitat user to consider that is for AV control. Along with a C4 remote it's not a bad option for a Logitech Harmony replacement.
Can you clarify or post a link to what you’re referring to?
Hi aalyar, I saw this on the facebook "Hibitat users group" copy and pasted below
Just an observation for whatever it may be worth. After days of going down blind alleys and scouring the community for dated snippets of advice, I have Echo Speaks up and running. And without having to pay for a third-party service.
Each of my Amazon Echo’s is now a Hubitat device with a multitude of commands available including each being a notification option in RM.
Glad I did it and simply because of the pleasure of learning new things. For those not similarly wired, Hubitat virtual contact/switch devices and Alexa routines are likely still the way to go.
Hope that helps
I think there is some misunderstanding on your part. Echo Speaks is very much dependent on Amazon's cloud.
What the author of that Facebook post is indicating is that they have a local server (such as a Raspberry Pi) performing an authentication against Amazon's cloud to provide Echo Speaks running on their Hubitat with a cookie so it can use Alexa cloud services.
As opposed to using a cloud service (such as Heroku) to perform that authentication against Amazon's servers.
Also, Echo Speaks by itself doesn't provide any voice control. For details on Echo Speaks, see this post:
