A new home for the blog — and a voice update

If you’re reading this, the site looks rather different. After years on WordPress, we’ve rebuilt Sage Smart Home from the ground up as a static site — no database, no plugin-update treadmill, and nothing quietly phoning home in the background. It felt only right. We spend our days telling people to keep their smart homes local, lean and under their own control, so the website may as well practise what we preach. It’s faster, it’s simpler, and every post you’ve read here before has come along for the ride.

While we had the bonnet up, plenty has changed in the smart home too — and 2026 has turned into the year voice control got genuinely interesting again.

Alexa+ has landed

Amazon’s rebuilt assistant arrived in the UK on Early Access back in March. It’s free if you’ve got Prime, or £19.99 a month if you haven’t. Under the bonnet it’s a proper generative-AI overhaul — built on a mix of large language models rather than the old rigid command parser — and the difference shows. You can talk to it like a person instead of memorising the exact phrasing, string a few requests together, and ask it to actually go and do things rather than just answer.

After the better part of a decade with Alexa as the “hub” tying everything together, it’s the first update in a long while that’s changed how it feels to use. The catches are the ones you’d expect from us, though: it’s still the cloud, it’s still a subscription, and “more personal” always quietly means “knows more about you.”

Giving the house its own voice

Which is exactly why the development we’re most excited about sits at the other end of the spectrum. Home Assistant has been building local voice since its “Year of Voice” back in 2023, and in 2026 it’s properly come of age.

The Assist pipeline now does the whole job — wake word, speech-to-text, the brains, and text-to-speech — entirely on your own hardware. We’re running it on the Proxmox box: faster-whisper doing the listening, Piper doing the talking, and a small local LLM sitting behind it (the Qwen3 models are the community favourite right now). The clever bit is the split: Assist handles the everyday “turn the kitchen light on” instantly and locally, and only the woolly, natural-language stuff — “it’s a bit dark in here, can you sort it out?” — gets handed to the LLM. It’s quick, it’s private, and not a single word leaves the house.

You don’t even need to build your own satellites to try it. There’s a tidy little Voice Preview Edition puck for around fifty quid, and the companion app can now do wake-word detection on an old phone you’ve got lying about.

So which do we use?

Both, unapologetically. Alexa+ where the convenience earns its keep, and Home Assistant’s local voice for the private, always-there core we actually trust to run the house. That’s rather the whole point of how we work — pick the right tool, stay neutral on the badge, and keep control local where it matters.

If you’re weighing up the same choices for your own place, that’s exactly the sort of thing a free chat is for.