Amazon’s Echo smart speakers have been incredibly popular, with sales in the tens of millions at their peak. If you have old Echo smart speakers lying around, don’t throw them away just yet; there are plenty of ways to put them to good use.
Root your Echo and replace Alexa with Home Assistant
Leave Amazon’s smart home ecosystem behind
A second-generation Echo Dot is currently one of the most useful old Echos out there. While the hardware is nearly a decade old, if you still have one lying around, there’s a surprising amount you can do with it.
That’s because some clever people have figured out how to root the Echo Dot 2, opening up a whole world of possibilities that Amazon never intended. There are several community projects that make use of a rooted Echo Dot 2, with EchoMuse being a popular option.
EchoMuse turns a rooted Echo Dot 2 into a Home Assistant voice satellite that you can use for controlling your smart home with voice commands. Instead of those commands having to pass through Amazon’s servers, everything can happen locally, with your Echo communicating directly with your Home Assistant server.
The project allows you to make use of the Echo’s seven-microphone array, built-in speaker, physical buttons, and even the LED ring used for visual notifications. Home Assistant’s Assist becomes the voice assistant instead of Alexa, allowing you to do far more than an Echo usually allows. EchoLocal is another similar project that allows you to use your Echo as a voice-controlled media player, an ambient light sensor, and even a Bluetooth proxy.
Run a tiny LLM on the Echo’s own hardware
Local speech recognition and AI
While EchoMuse and EchoLocal make use of the Echo Dot’s microphones and speakers, the majority of the heavy lifting is done by Home Assistant. The device essentially becomes a front end for your Assist pipeline, with Home Assistant handling things such as determining what you’ve said and understanding your intent.
There’s another Echo Dot 2 project that manages to get a lot of things running on the Echo Dot itself, and what it can do is pretty crazy considering the limited hardware. The project runs Sherpa-ONNX on the Echo for local speech recognition and uses llama.cpp to run a small LLM on the Echo Dot itself. You can talk to the Echo and have it process basic voice commands, not only without any data leaving your home, but without any data leaving the Echo itself.
The usage is very limited, since the Echo can only run a tiny model, so don’t expect it to replace your Echo Dot’s full set of features. It’s an interesting indication of what even old hardware can do, however.
Make a third-generation Echo Dot into a Home Assistant voice satellite
A custom PCB cuts Amazon out of the picture
While many old Echo speaker hacks require the rootable Echo Dot 2, there’s another project that’s designed for the third-generation Echo Dot. Since there are no current hacks for rooting the Echo Dot 3, this project takes a more drastic approach and replaces part of the Echo Dot’s internals with a custom PCB.
The replacement board is based around an ESP32-S3 and enables you to access much of the original hardware, including the four-microphone array, the physical buttons, and the LED ring. With the PCB in place, you can use the Echo Dot 3 as a Home Assistant voice satellite, completely cutting Alexa out of the equation.
Use the speaker to upgrade other hardware
The internals are still great even if the firmware isn’t
One of the reasons that hacking old Echo devices has become so popular is that the hardware used in the devices is pretty good. There is speculation that Amazon has sold some Echo devices at a loss to hook people into their ecosystem, so the components can often still be very good for the price.
One Home Assistant user came up with a clever way to take advantage of the hardware of an old Echo by using it to upgrade their Home Assistant Voice Preview smart speaker. The compact speaker in Home Assistant’s device isn’t really designed for playing music, but an Echo speaker can do a reasonable job.
The Voice Assistant Echo Edition project combines the hardware and software of a Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition with the speaker hardware of an Echo Dot 3. The whole thing lives in a 3D-printed enclosure, and with a little speaker grille cloth wrapped around it, it looks like a slightly taller Echo Dot 3 and has sound quality to match.
Turn a dead Echo into a portable Bluetooth speaker
Even a broken Echo can still be useful
If your old Echo speaker is dead, you may think that the only option is to dispose of it. However, all that hardware can potentially still serve a purpose. As long as the speaker is still working, you may be able to turn it into a battery-powered portable Bluetooth speaker.
It’s possible to fit a Bluetooth amplifier board and battery power board inside an Echo Dot, so that you can play music over Bluetooth and power the device completely with batteries. The best part is that the components are only a few dollars, so you can turn a dead Echo into something genuinely useful for very little cost. You can then freak out other people who won’t be able to work out how your Amazon Echo Dot is somehow playing music when it isn’t plugged into power.
Don’t let your Echo’s hardware go to waste
Alexa was exciting when it first appeared on the scene but has ultimately been something of a disappointment. You don’t need to let your Echo smart speaker hardware go to waste, however. There are plenty of ways to breathe new life into your old smart speakers.