EchoMuse
Turn an old Amazon Echo Dot (2nd gen) into a local voice assistant for Home Assistant.
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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). Its
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 Dot needs a one-time unlock over USB with
R0rt1z2's tool first. Follow the instructions and it is straightforward. If
a step goes wrong the Dot can end up soft-bricked, and the
XDA thread
covers recovering it.
- Not for other Echo models, yet. Only the Echo Dot 2nd gen works today.
Ports to the Echo Dot 3, Echo 2 and Echo Show 8 are in progress with
community help.
- Not affiliated with Amazon.
What you need
|
|
| An Echo Dot 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 Linux computer (a live USB works) and a micro-USB cable, once |
To unlock the Dot. The unlock does not run on macOS. |
| Chrome or Edge, once |
The setup wizard talks to the Dot over USB from the browser. |
Getting started
Unlock the Dot with R0rt1z2's
amonet-biscuit.
Either version works: v1.1.0 leaves it on FireOS 5, v2.0.0 moves it to
FireOS 6. The rooting guide explains the choice. You
do this at your own risk.
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
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:
- 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.
Features
- Voice turns through Assist, with the answer played on the Dot.
- Wake word on the controller or on the Dot. By default the controller
listens for the wake word. The Dot can do it itself instead: switch it on
in the dashboard's wake word settings, for every Dot or just one. If a Dot can't (older firmware, or its wake
word model isn't installed yet), the controller takes over, so it never
goes deaf.
- Barge-in: say the wake word over a reply to interrupt it.
- More than one Dot: the first to hear the wake word answers and the rest
stay quiet.
- Music: each Dot is a Home Assistant media player (media browser, Music
Assistant, radio). Speaking over music lowers it under the answer rather
than pausing it.
- Timers and announcements from Home Assistant.
- Custom wake words you train yourself with
oww_forge
and install from the dashboard.
- Extras in Home Assistant: a Bluetooth proxy per Dot (handy with
Bermuda), an ambient light sensor on
Dots that have one, and the action button as an event you can automate.
- A dashboard for setup, updates, per-device settings (EQ, LED ring, mic
tuning), logs and a history of voice turns.
- Firmware updates over WiFi, with automatic rollback if a new version
fails to start. emOS itself is updated by re-running the wizard, for now
(#573).
Privacy
- The Echo listens for its wake word itself. Nothing leaves it until it
hears the wake word. Then what you say goes to the controller on your LAN
and on to Home Assistant, and stops when you stop speaking. Where it goes
after that depends on your Assist pipeline (fully local with Whisper and
Piper, or a cloud service if you chose one). A false wake sends a few
seconds of audio you didn't mean to; that is true of every wake word
system, Amazon's included. How it works.
- You can detect the wake word on the controller instead, per Echo. That
Echo then streams its microphone to the controller all the time, on your
LAN and nowhere else, and the dashboard says so. Installs from before this
keep their existing setting until you change it (Config → Wake word
detection). Firmware that predates it streams in every mode and is labelled
that way until you update it.
- No telemetry. No analytics, no install counter. The controller only
connects out to GitHub, to check for and download releases, and you can set
how often it checks (details).
- The mute button is a software mute. It silences the microphones in the
audio chip and EchoMuse refuses to listen while it is on, but the Dot 2 has
no hardware switch that disconnects them.
Status and known issues
EchoMuse is in active development and runs daily on a small fleet. emOS is
newer than FireOS and has fewer device-hours behind it. Open issues worth
knowing before you start:
- The 3.5mm jack: unplugging can stall the microphone for about 30 seconds (#117,
#141).
- emOS on FireOS 6 cannot join WPA3 networks: the WiFi driver has no support
for it. Use WPA2 (#536).
- An announcement during a ringing timer can't be heard
(#373).
Everything else is in the issue tracker.
Getting help
- Questions and bugs about EchoMuse go to
our issues, not to the XDA
thread. The thread is for the unlock only.
- Check the FAQ first.
- Attach a support bundle (Dashboard → Support → Download bundle). It holds
the logs and versions we need, with transcripts, recordings and network
names removed.
Documentation
How it's built
EchoMuse is written largely with Claude,
Anthropic's AI model, directed by the maintainer. More than half
the commits carry a Co-Authored-By: Claude line, and replies on our issues
are signed "Team EchoMuse (powered by Claude)". Nothing about that is hidden.
Credits
EchoMuse would not exist without:
- R0rt1z2, for amonet-biscuit,
the unlock that everything here depends on.
- Binozo, for EchoGo, the original SDK
for this hardware, and GoTinyAlsa.
- Dragon863, for EchoCLI.
- David Scripka, for openWakeWord.
- Xiph.Org, for SpeexDSP (the echo
canceller), and Nils L. Westhausen, for DTLN
(noise suppression).
- Home Assistant and ESPHome, whose open voice stack EchoMuse plugs into.
- Everyone who has contributed code,
filed issues or tested on their own hardware.
Licence
EchoMuse is MIT licensed. It includes third-party components that
keep their own licences, listed with their copyright notices in
NOTICE.md. emOS releases also ship busybox (GPL-2.0), with its
source and licence attached to each release, and wpa_supplicant (BSD).
Amazon, Echo, Echo Dot, Alexa and FireOS are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or
its affiliates. EchoMuse is an independent project, not affiliated with or
endorsed by Amazon.
它把一台二手的 Amazon Echo Dot(第二代,2016 年)改造成 Home Assistant 的本地语音终端:说出唤醒词、提问,然后从 Dot 里听到回答。不需要 Amazon 账号、不需要 Alexa、也不连云端——麦克风、扬声器、LED 灯环和按钮都照常工作。