The second-generation Echo Dot was the first smart speaker I ever owned, but it was ultimately a disappointment.There was nothing inherently wrong with the hardware; it was Amazon's proprietary software that was always the problem.It's possible to hack an old Echo Dot and escape Amazon's ecosystem altogether.
Old Amazon Echos have surprisingly good hardware It may not look like much, but it's got it where it counts The second-generation Echo Dot was released way back in 2016.It was never much of a looker, resembling a small black hockey puck, but it was regularly heavily discounted, so you could often buy one for a very affordable price.While it may not look like much, there's a lot of fairly capable hardware in an old Echo Dot.
It has a seven-microphone far-field microphone array that's designed to pick up speech from the far side of a room.There's a built-in speaker, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, physical buttons, and the famous Echo light ring.The whole thing is powered by a quad-core processor running Fire OS, Amazon's Android-based operating system.
Despite being a decade old, there's still plenty that all of that hardware could do if it wasn't so heavily locked down by Amazon.Thankfully, some clever people have figured out how to get around those restrictions.Related 7 Reasons I’m Ditching My Amazon Echo Smart Speakers "Alexa, it's time to go." Posts 19 By Adam Davidson This Home Assistant user hacked and debloated an Echo Dot 2 A script disables a lot of Amazon's software Close A Reddit user called Alberto Zurini posted a video in the Home Assistant subreddit showing a hacked Echo Dot 2 responding to the Alexa wake word and running custom code completely locally without anything being sent to Amazon's cloud services.
The key to this project is the fact that it's possible to unlock and root an Echo Dot 2, using a method posted on the XDA forums.Once Zurini had gained access to the device, he began stripping away the software that makes the Echo Dot 2 dependent on Amazon.His GitHub repo includes a debloat script that you can run on a rooted Echo Dot 2 to do the same.
He then reverse-engineered the wake word server on the Echo Dot and replaced the native wake word service with a custom wake word engine.The Echo Dot still responds to "Alexa," but the wake word detection happens completely on-device.The upshot is that the wake word still works, the speaker still works, and even the buttons and light ring still work, without relying on Amazon's cloud services.
The most impressive part is running an AI directly on the Echo Dot Alexa can be replaced with a local voice assistant This isn't the only recent project that involves a hacked Echo Dot; there are others such as EchoLocal and EchoMuse that allow you to use a second-generation Echo Dot as a local voice satellite.What's different about Echo Dot 2 Playground is that the other projects turn the Echo Dot into a voice satellite that passes spoken commands to the Assist voice assistant to handle the thinking.This project has the processing running on the Echo Dot itself.
Zurini realized that the 512 MB of onboard RAM and 5 GB/s maximum memory bandwidth might be enough to allow the Echo Dot to run a small local LLM.Using Sherpa_ONNX for local speech recognition and llama.cpp to run the tiny 25-million parameter LLM, the Echo Dot can run the model at around four tokens per second, which is enough to handle simple requests such as turning on lights, playing sounds, or responding to simple spoken prompts.Old hardware doesn't have to become e-waste The hardware is still solid This project isn't going to turn your old Echo Dot into a fully functional smart speaker that can replicate all the features of Alexa on-device.
The response time of the local LLM is slow, and the things it can do are extremely limited.As a proof-of-concept, it's genuinely impressive.If you want to put your Echo Dot to good use, one of the projects that allows you to use your Echo Dot as a voice satellite is likely to be more helpful.
You can still run everything locally, but on more powerful hardware than you find inside your Echo Dot.Being able to use your Echo Dot to talk to Assist in Home Assistant is genuinely useful.It's taking old hardware and making it useful instead of just throwing it away, which can only be a good thing.
Amazon's hardware can be really useful The Echo Dot 2 isn't the only Amazon device that you can remove from Amazon's clutches and put to better use.I've jailbroken my Echo Show 5 to turn it into a Home Assistant dashboard, and I've used my jailbroken Kindle 4 for everything from streaming my video doorbell to working as a second monitor.It's worth seeing what you can do with your old tech before you toss it in the trash.
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