Ask HN: Best Smart Speaker and libraries for hacking

[bensandcastle]

I’d like to build an audio life coach. Plays me a few things I find useful at different times of the day. If I’m out I would have it call my phone and talk to me.

I’m interested in: What smart speaker has great audio tech (ie microphone array) that I can use for my own apps.

What audio libraries are the best for doing speech recognition?

What are the best scheduling libraries that I can use to integrate all this together and have it add and remove things from a calendar, send emails, Eg ifttt type stuff.

I understand the answer is likely Google Home/Alexa for part of this, but I would very much prefer a solution where the processing runs on my hardware and doesn’t need to listen/send my audio to a third party.