EchoLocal is an MIT-licensed, Go-based open-source replacement for Alexa that turns a supported Amazon Echo Dot or Echo Show into a fully local Home Assistant voice satellite, media player, display and Bluetooth proxy, with no Amazon account and no cloud — aimed at Home Assistant users who want to keep the Echo hardware they already own.

What it is

EchoLocal runs on the Echo itself and uses the device's existing microphones, speaker and buttons rather than asking anyone to buy new hardware. It presents the device to Home Assistant through the ESPHome native API, so Home Assistant discovers it the way it discovers an ESPHome node, and voice, audio, display and Bluetooth all stay on the local network. The project is written in Go and released under the MIT licence, and it ships with a companion Home Assistant integration published as a HACS repository at ygelfand/echolocal-hacs.

The problem it solves is the cloud dependency of Alexa. On the supported hardware — Echo Dot (2nd gen), Echo Show 5 (1st and 2nd gen) and Echo Show 8 (1st and 2nd gen), all running Fire OS 6.x or 7.x — EchoLocal replaces the Alexa assistant in place. Wake word detection runs on the device with microWakeWord and openWakeWord, and the captured audio is routed to a Home Assistant Assist pipeline instead of to Amazon, so a working speaker-and-screen device becomes a local voice endpoint, an intercom handset, a dashboard and a Bluetooth proxy without being retired.

Key capabilities

• On-device wake words are provided by microWakeWord and openWakeWord, with two assistants that each have their own wake word and Assist pipeline, and "Stop" works without a wake word.
• The speaker is exposed to Home Assistant as a media_player for announcements, TTS and music with ducking under the wake word, alongside a Sendspin player for Music Assistant and a Chromecast receiver that carries audio only on the Dot.
• Two-layer white noise can be mixed from white, pink, brown, rain, ocean, fan, fire, brook, cabin, crickets and wind, and timers and alerts support custom tones for chimes, timers and wake sounds.
• Intercom calls run between devices on the local network, with audio on the Dot and audio plus video on the Shows, including broadcasts to every device and voice commands such as "call the kitchen" or "broadcast dinner is ready" through the EchoLocal integration.
• A Bluetooth proxy extends Home Assistant's Bluetooth reach for integrations such as Bermuda, and while the proxy is on the device advertises an iBeacon with UUID 9c5fa6f1-91c4-4f56-bb9f-d92acfd9d40b, major 1 and a minor taken from the last two bytes of its factory MAC.
• Every device serves an HTTPS web page with searchable settings, alarms, calls, broadcasts and logs, an HTTP API behind it for scripts, exportable and importable portable settings, and — on an Echo Show — live screen control with QR pairing and remote keyboard input.
• The Echo Dot's light ring is twelve individually addressable segments with effects for ambient, motion, alerts and room-reactive behaviour, and its buttons arrive in Home Assistant as events covering press-and-hold on every button plus double and triple taps on the action button; Echo Shows add a native dashboard with 21 clock faces, photo wallpaper, weather, lights, switches and cameras.

Who uses it and how

• Home Assistant households that already have Echo Dots and Echo Shows mounted around the house use EchoLocal to adopt that hardware into Home Assistant through the ESPHome native API instead of replacing it.
• Multi-room homes use the intercom and broadcast features for room-to-room calls and whole-house announcements, with a home key that keeps calls and broadcasts restricted to the owner's own devices.
• Music Assistant and Chromecast users target the device through the Sendspin player or the Chromecast receiver, and the same speaker handles TTS announcements and ducking under the wake word.
• People extending Bluetooth coverage install it as a Bluetooth proxy for integrations like Bermuda, and use the iBeacon advertisement for positioning tools such as BLE Positioning System.
• Automators drive the device from scripts through the HTTP API and from button events, per-segment ring colours and room-reactive ring effects.

Getting started

The EchoLocal integration is distributed as a HACS repository at github.com/ygelfand/echolocal-hacs, with per-device setup steps in the guide at echolocal.link/start/devices/ and builds published on the project's Releases page; Home Assistant then discovers the device through the ESPHome native API and updates it from within Home Assistant, on the stable or development channel or by naming any recent version to roll back.

How it compares

EchoLocal sits alongside ESPHome rather than competing with it: the device speaks the ESPHome native API, so Home Assistant treats it as an ESPHome node, and its speaker doubles as a Sendspin player for Music Assistant. Its closest relative in the facts is the sister project LANovo, which applies the same approach to Lenovo Smart Display, JBL Link View and Lenovo ThinkSmart View hardware, while EchoLocal itself covers the Echo Dot and Echo Show.

When to use it — and when not to

EchoLocal assumes a running Home Assistant instance, a device from the supported list — Echo Dot (2nd gen), Echo Show 5 (1st and 2nd gen) and Echo Show 8 (1st and 2nd gen) on Fire OS 6.x or 7.x — and someone prepared to operate the HTTPS web interface, with either a self-signed certificate or one issued by Cert Warden, on top of Home Assistant itself. Anyone whose Echo model falls outside that list, or who wants an off-the-shelf cloud assistant with no local infrastructure to run, should not pick it up. The supported device set is narrow, and with 38 open issues against 503 stars the project is a small, actively changing codebase rather than a long-settled one.

mv echolocal_darwin_arm64 echolocal
chmod +x echolocal
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine echolocal   # macOS only, if Gatekeeper blocks it
./echolocal install --name living-room

Rename-Item echolocal_windows_x86_64.exe echolocal.exe
.\echolocal.exe install --name living-room

make build-echod                  # echod for the Echo Dot
make build-echod BOARD=crown      # echod for an Echo Show: checkers, cronos, crown or athena
make install-echod                # build, install and restart it on the attached device (requires prior full installation)