It’s fine, they’ll just suggest a new generation of baby boomers to get the population back up again.

It’s not hugely complicated but instead of me having to ask an assistant everything, I let HA tell me everything through various speakers based on the state of sensors around the house at appropriate times.

When I wake up in the morning and go downstairs it’ll detect my presence, and if it’s a work day it’ll inform me of weather, traffic (as well as a suggested time to aim to leave by) and a basic schedule of my day, then it’ll stick some music on.

As it gets closer to the time to leave it’ll chime up again telling me I have x minutes left to get ready, but only if it detects me in a room so I definitely hear it.

All that is controlled by HA automatically and isn’t something you’d ever get from any of the big players, because they don’t have the sort of information and stats that HA does.

If I set a timer in Google Home then it’ll become available to HA through it’s integration and I’ll pop up a timer bar on some of the displays I have dotted around so I can track the time left without having to talk to the assistant, and as any timer gets close to expiring then it’ll even show a message on the TV saying which timer is about to activate.

There’s a few smaller things that just make life a bit easier too, like turning speakers off in rooms that aren’t active, or integrating my dumb doorbell into HA using an RF receiver so I can automate doorbell presses.

Home Assistant is currently working hard on assistants. I’ve not used it much yet but their text to speech offers so much more than any of the larger companies in just customisation alone, plus it all runs locally.

I have Google Home devices all over but they currently mostly act as a dumb speaker and I just get HA to do all of the heavy lifting. The most Google does is set timers and even that just goes into HA for most of the processing.

Comcast doesn’t exist in the UK by name, but Sky does. Sky owns the website. Guess who owns Sky?

Money.

Every one of these companies has the exact same target, which is to make more money for their shareholders than the previous quarter at the expense of everything else.

When a company is small and not making as much it’s easier to make little changes to increase capital, but as the company gets larger and they run out of avenues to extract cash from they start getting more and more desperate and their tactics get more and more obvious.

I’ve just left a company for this exact reason, as their little cash grabbing exercises were starting to impact employees and they were making cuts all over the place in order to keep up the illusion of growth.

These CEOs don’t think about the impact that new policies make, they just see more money not being extracted.