There’s an Alexa on the kitchen counter. Has been for years. It does what it was sold to do – timers, weather, the occasional radio station, the occasional misheard request that turns the living room lamp on instead of the kitchen one. It works. That isn’t the problem.
The problem is that it’s Amazon’s. Every wake word fires somewhere I can’t see. Every utterance routes through servers I don’t own. The voice was picked by Amazon. The personality was picked by Amazon. The skills are shaped by whatever Amazon’s commercial priorities happen to be this quarter, which historically have not aligned with mine.
The reference point for what I actually wanted is Rick’s Garage AI from Rick and Morty. A basement-tinkerer assistant that’s been lived with, argued with, repaired, tolerated. Opinionated. Occasionally hostile in ways I had no interest in copying – I wanted the ‘belongs to one specific household’ part, not the contempt for users part. The character can have a point of view without being cruel.
The trick is where the character lives. Mine lives in a Python middleware layer sitting between Home Assistant and the language model. Home Assistant handles the lights and the boiler and the Zigbee mesh. The middleware handles personality – which prompt, which voice, what to do with the emotion tags coming back from the model. The character is mine. The intelligence is rented from Anthropic, because I don’t have a local model that can do what Claude does and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Brain at the back, face at the front, and the bit where it feels like ‘my’ AI sits between them.
That distinction matters more than I expected it to. The bits people fixate on with personal AI – which model, which TTS, which hardware – are mostly interchangeable. The bit that makes the thing feel like yours is the layer above all of it. The character. The constraints. The decision about what it does and doesn’t say.
The Garage AI cost more than an Alexa. It took weeks longer to set up than an Alexa. It does fewer things than an Alexa. It will probably keep doing fewer things than an Alexa for some time. None of that is the point.
The point is whose it is.