Sadly they were all tripping over each other for a taste of that sweet extortion money.

Those hosting the more popular environments. The posts would live on perhaps but target enough people and it likely becomes too small for them to care anymore, sadly.

It does beg the question who pays the insurance until your get it the first time. I suspect you do though.

Yeah OP is right if they are just going to surf the web.

To answer your question, yes.

However, I’ve found that unless you’re going to host your own AI engine with a GPU, you’re stuck with OpenAI or Google Gemini. Luckily I’ve been able to use both with just the free tier.

Whisper and Piper run locally although Piper is a little slow on the green for my tastes. 4 second responses work, but are also frustrating when you’re not sure if it heard you or not. You’re also stuck with just the built in intents (phrases) so you need to be specific in how you say stuff.

Ultimately I set up a cloud based and a local based voice workflow and then I setup a ping probe to a IPs. If I detect the internet is up, it uses the cloud workflow. If the internet is down, it swaps to local to keep the house voice controlled.