[antonyt]

The nerve center would be your Home Assistant instance, which is not this device. You can run Home Assistant on whatever hardware you like, including options sold by Nabu Casa.

This device provides the microphone, speaker, and WiFi to do wake-word detection, capture your input, send it off to your HA instance, and reply to you with HA’s processed response. Whether your HA instance phones out to the internet to produce the response is up to you and how you’ve configured it.