How can I not waste an Alexa without feeding Amazon?

https://slrpnk.net/post/35625763

How can I not waste an Alexa without feeding Amazon? - SLRPNK

A friend was dumping stuff prior to a move. I took all his electro gadgets just to prevent it becoming e-waste. In the pile of stuff is an Amazon Alexa. Fuck #Amazon. I boycott Amazon and also have principled objections to their snooping, business practices, etc. My choices seem to be: * trash the Alexa * donate the Alexa to charity These are both lousy choices. Donating it as-is would ultimately put it in someone’s house which then feeds Amazon. Is there another option? I did a quick search and see no FOSS to replace whatever garbage Amazon has on it. It could be attached to the LAN with an egress firewall that blocks cloud access, but I suppose then it is useless, correct?

You could replace the microcontroller with an ESP32S3 and use the speaker and microphone with Home Assistant/Music Assistant or Willow voice assistant to essentially replace a lot of the real-use functionality: lights, music, and timers that Amazon said itself was almost all of its use according to their data harvesting 😂.

It depends how DIY/electronics savvy you are or if you are looking for a project.