July 1, 2026
Alexa who? Bathroom speaker beef
Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
A cheap open smart speaker drops, and the crowd is equal parts hopeful and deeply suspicious
TLDR: Pine64 has launched a $50 smart speaker for people who want a private, build-it-yourself alternative to Amazon and Google devices. Commenters love the idea but are split between cheering the open approach and worrying it’ll sound bad, ship rough, or be impossible to buy.
Pine64 has rolled out a $50 smart speaker aimed at the do-it-yourself smart home crowd, and the reaction is basically: "finally!" mixed with "yeah, but does it actually work?" The pitch is juicy on paper: a privacy-friendly speaker that can run on your own home setup instead of sending everything to Big Tech’s cloud. For people tired of Amazon and Google listening in, that’s catnip. But the comments quickly turned into a classic gadget trust fall, with many readers cheering the idea while side-eyeing the execution.
The loudest mood? Cautious optimism with a side of battle scars. One commenter said they’re surprised Pine64 is still around because so many of its products seem forever out of stock, while another admitted they don’t own anything from the company but still want it to succeed just because it keeps the open-hardware dream alive. That’s the vibe: people are rooting for the underdog, even if they don’t quite trust it to deliver.
Then came the real drama: sound quality and voice performance. One user flat-out said they’re waiting for reviews after being burned by another Home Assistant voice gadget with a bad speaker, bad mic, and pickup so poor that an old Echo "blew it out of the water." Ouch. Another asked the key normie question: does it actually process voice commands locally, or is this just more privacy theater? And yes, there was comedy too: the device’s look got roasted as something that might belong on a bathroom shelf rather than in a futuristic smart home. Cheap, open, a little scruffy, and already causing arguments? In other words, very Pine64.
Key Points
- •Pine64 launched PineVoice, a $49.99 open-hardware smart speaker built on a Bouffalo Lab BL606P RISC-V SoC.
- •The device includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, Zigbee, a dual microphone array, a speaker, local wake word detection, and physical control buttons.
- •Its factory firmware is based on Alibaba’s open-source YoC platform and uses the Wyoming Satellite protocol for self-hosted Linux-based Home Assistant setups.
- •The article notes that the Wyoming protocol is deprecated by the project, which recommends Linux Voice Assistant using the ESPHome protocol instead.
- •PineVoice is described as an early-stage, non-consumer-grade product aimed at developers and tinkerers, and it comes with a USB cable, quick start guide, and 30-day warranty.