Skip to main content
WanderVerse › Products › WanderSpeaker
Pipeline — Help Shape It

WanderSpeaker

Local voice assistant — Amazon confirmed Alexa recordings stored indefinitely until manually deleted, Amazon Alexa+ uploads all voice to cloud with no opt-out (March 2025), Google Assistant sends voice to Google for ad targeting.

Smart Home
ReplacesAmazon Echo/Alexa+ (cloud upload, no opt-out) / Google Home (ad targeting) / Siri ($95M settlement)
Open-source baseRaspberry Pi + faster-whisper + Piper

About

Amazon confirmed in 2019 that Alexa voice recordings are stored indefinitely unless manually deleted by users — and that a small team of human reviewers listens to recordings to improve accuracy. Amazon Alexa+ (announced March 28, 2025) uploads all voice recordings to Amazon's servers with no opt-out option. Google Assistant voice data is used to improve Google's advertising models. Siri sends audio clips to Apple for human review — Apple paid $95M to settle a class action in 2021 over Siri privacy violations. Every major voice assistant routes your home conversations through corporate servers. WanderSpeaker uses faster-whisper for on-device speech recognition and Piper for TTS — both run fully locally on Raspberry Pi hardware. No audio leaves your home. Alexa Together was discontinued by Amazon in June 2024; WanderSpeaker fills that gap for WanderElder users specifically.

✦

Features

  • No audio ever sent to cloud: faster-whisper speech recognition runs entirely on-device
  • Piper TTS: text-to-speech on-device — no Google/Amazon voice synthesis required
  • Amazon Alexa+ gap: no-cloud alternative after March 2025 forced cloud upload announcement
  • Alexa Together discontinued June 2024: elder assistant functionality without Amazon infrastructure
  • No human reviewers: your conversations are not reviewed by Amazon contractor staff
  • WanderDash integration: voice commands for local home intelligence panel
  • Luen AI backend: local LLM for contextual responses — never cloud-processed
  • Accessibility-first: dysphoria-aware voice options, adjustable speech rate, hearing-impaired modes
  • Wake word on-device: detection runs locally, never streaming to a server
  • Works offline: full functionality with no internet connection required
Hand-assembled

Built by supported employment workers — people with intellectual disabilities, autism, and physical disabilities — through WWP's fulfillment program. Every product ships with a Built By card. Competitive wage, never 14(c) subminimum.

Repair & refurb

Send it back. Prepaid label. Component-level repair, module upgrades, firmware updates. 7-year spare parts guarantee. Donate on return — refurbished hardware goes to shelter and community partners. GPL firmware: the device works even if WanderVerse shuts down.

No hardware subscription — ever

BMW charged $18/mo for heated seats already in your car. GM locked remote start. Eero charges for VPN on hardware that could run it free. We don't do that. You bought it, you own it — every feature works forever, no subscription required. WanderAssist ($9/mo optional) is a convenience layer, never a gate. Safety features are never paywalled.

Pro & Lux tiers — coming

Every WanderVerse hardware product will offer Pro and Lux finish tiers — premium materials and handcrafted finishes by WanderVerse Artisans: supported employment workers with artistic skills. Each Lux unit ships with a Finished By card. Lux revenue cross-subsidizes nonprofit pricing.

← All products WanderVerse home Founding Member Investor Waitlist