Yeah, OP is comparing this to Google/Amazon/Apple/etc devices but this is being developed by the nonprofit that manages development on Home Assistant and in cooperation with their large community of users. It's a very different attitude driving development of voice remotes for Home Assistant vs. large corporations. They've been around for a while now and have a proven track record of being actual, serious advocates for data privacy and user autonomy. Maybe they won't be forever, but then this thing is open source.
The whole point is that you control what these things do, and that you can run these things fully locally if you want with no internet access, and run your own custom software on them if that's what you want to do. This is a product for the Home Assistant community that will probably never turn much of a profit, nor do I expect it is intended to.
