EchoMuse

Turn an old Amazon Echo Dot (2nd gen) or Echo (2nd gen) into a local voice assistant for Home Assistant.

Join the community — Discord · r/echomuse

EchoMuse makes a second-hand Echo Dot a voice satellite for Home Assistant: say the wake word, ask something, and hear the answer from the Dot. There is no Amazon account, no Alexa and no cloud service of ours. The Dot shows up in Home Assistant as an ordinary ESPHome voice satellite, so there is nothing extra to install there.

At a glance

What it is

• A replacement for the software on an Echo Dot 2nd generation (2016) or an Echo 2nd generation (2017). Their microphones, speaker, LED ring and buttons all work.
• A controller you run on your own network, as a Home Assistant add-on or a Docker container. It detects the wake word, manages your devices and has a web dashboard.
• A way to reuse hardware that sells second-hand for very little.

What it isn't

• Not Alexa. No Alexa skills, shopping, calling, Drop In or Amazon account. The assistant is Home Assistant's Assist, so it can do what your Home Assistant can do.
• Not standalone. You need a working Home Assistant with an Assist pipeline. Home Assistant does the speech recognition, the understanding and the voice.
• Not ready out of the box. The Echo needs a one-time unlock over USB first, which firebreak runs from one command. If a step goes wrong the Echo can end up soft-bricked, and the XDA thread for the Dot or the Echo covers recovering it.
• Not for other Echo models, yet. The Echo Dot 2nd gen and the Echo 2nd gen are supported. The Echo Dot 3rd gen is planned.
• Not affiliated with Amazon.

What you need

An Echo Dot 2nd gen or an Echo 2nd gen	The hardware being repurposed.
Home Assistant	With a working Assist pipeline.
An always-on computer	Runs the controller. The Home Assistant machine itself is fine if it runs add-ons.
A computer (macOS, Linux or Windows) and a micro-USB cable, once	To unlock the Echo with firebreak.
Chrome or Edge, once	The setup wizard talks to the Echo over USB from the browser.

Getting started

1. Unlock the Echo with firebreak, which runs R0rt1z2's unlocks: amonet-biscuit for the Dot and amonet-radar for the Echo. On the Dot either target works: unlock fireos5 leaves it on FireOS 5, unlock fireos6 (the default) on FireOS 6, and the rooting guide explains the choice. The Echo has one, to FireOS 6. You do this at your own risk.

2. Start the controller, as an add-on:

   or with Docker:

   mkdir echomuse && cd echomuse
   curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wilbowes/EchoMuse/main/controller/docker-compose.deploy.yml
   curl -o .env https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wilbowes/EchoMuse/main/controller/.env.example
   docker compose -f docker-compose.deploy.yml up -d
   

3. Run the setup wizard from the dashboard with the Dot plugged in over USB. It installs everything and joins your WiFi. Approve the Dot in the dashboard and Home Assistant discovers it.

The quickstart walks through all three.

emOS or FireOS?

The wizard offers two ways to run EchoMuse on the Dot. The Echo 2nd gen runs emOS only:

• emOS (the default) replaces Amazon's Android with our own small Linux userspace, keeping only the Dot's kernel. It runs on FireOS 5 and FireOS 6 devices, and the 3.5mm jack works properly on it. The wizard keeps a copy of your original boot image, and restoring it takes about ten seconds.
• FireOS with root keeps Amazon's Android 5 and runs EchoMuse on top. FireOS 5 only. It is the older path, with the most hours behind it.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗