As Snowden told us, video and audio recording capabilities of your devices are NSA spying vectors. OSS/Linux is a safeguard against such capabilities. The massive datacenter investments in US will be used to classify us all into a patriotic (for Israel)/Oligarchist social credit score, and every mega tech company can increase profits through NSA cooperation, and are legally obligated to cooperate with all government orders.
Speech to text and speech automation are useful tech, though always listening state sponsored terrorists is a non-NSA targeted path for sweeping future social credit classifications of your past life.
Some small LLMs that can be used for speech to text: https://modal.com/blog/open-source-stt
The website seems to work fine for me, but they seem to only support open hardware (e.g. Raspberry Pi or Mycroft). That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work on other things though, especially with open software, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Echos require updates to be signed by Amazon, so it might require some hacking.